ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by jph00 on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @05:29PM (#22112387)

They don't pay for peer review. I'm not sure you mean by "professionally managed" or "edited" exactly - or why that would cost over $100m.

(Disclaimer: I wrote the tweet. Although I didn't expect it to appear on HN...)

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Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by denzil_correa on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @05:36PM (#22112472)

Thanks Jeremy for highlighting this issue.

A lot of scientific publishers have hijacked "Open Access" to charge high fees for the same publication as before and pocket more money. For example, "Springer Blood Cancer Journal" charges $ 4,580 as OA fees. I can't imagine how one can rationalize that cost.

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Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by lultimouomo on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @03:44AM (#22115771)

It's quite clear how you can rationalize it:

* to advance your career you need to publish in certain specific journals

* 5 grand is a reasonable amount of money to advance your career

therefore:

* it is reasonable to pay 5 grands to publish on such a journal

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Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by Someone on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @03:42AM (#22115763)

PLOS ONE’s fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn’t seem inexplainable to me. That’s “Springer Nature Blood Cancer Journal”, so factors of 1½ in “better editing”, “older, less efficient systems” and “fewer publications/year, so lower efficiency of scale” could already do it.

Also, is Nature working on digitizing old content? That can be costly (I remember reading somewhere that it could involve a) finding a library that has a copy and b) flying there to photograph it) and that’s a cost PLOS won’t ever have.

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Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by denzil_correa on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @04:38AM (#22116005)

> PLOS ONE’s fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn’t seem inexplainable to me.

You need to first explain why PLOS ONE is an appropriate baseline. A world class Open Access journal costs roughly $10 per submission [0]. Most arguments I have seen using PLOS ONE as a baseline, talk about the "non profit" part of PLOS. It has to be stressed here at that "non profit" doesn't mean PLOS works on a "non profit" business model. It just means that they generate profit AND the profit isn't distributed to its members, directors or officers [1].

[0] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non-profit_organizations

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Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by murkt on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @12:24AM (#22114871)

They probably mean administration of a peer review. Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

[1] There are now tools that automate and speed up finding peer reviewers, though, like https://www.prophy.science/referee-finder

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Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by chrisseaton on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @05:37AM (#22116279)

> Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

All done by volunteers!

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Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs by denzil_correa on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @03:45AM (#22115775)

> Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

This is done by the Program Chairs of the conference who are professors at universities. ACM doesn't do or pay anything for it.

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