Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
by chrisseaton on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @08:46PM
(#22113781)
> Your lol is misinformed.
In every ACM review committee I’ve participated in, it’s just volunteer members of the community emailing other other and using open source software to coordinate reviews.
I think all of the ACM conferences I contribute to have stopped actually printing physical proceedings. The consistent formatting is by a LaTeX document class, with an automated system that checks for bad fonts, text going into the margin, etc. The PDF that ends up in the Digital Library is the one the author submits (possibly with a watermark or stamp applied). I don't know if there is a small amount of ACM-provided human labour employed somewhere, but mostly they just provide a small amount of automation.
We can argue/debate about what is the value-add (and precise workflow difference) of the IEEE editorial process vs. arxiv, but there is a difference.
Like the comment you responded to, I'm not defending the precise differential. I'm a past IEEE member (and author, and reviewer) and found their membership fees excessive.