[ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
It feels a bit facile to bash the ACM for signing onto this letter. The
letter does not mean that they oppose making publications freely
available; in fact, I believe open access is a goal for ACM. The letter
means that they oppose having the government *mandate* that all
scientific publishers operate in this way. Exactly what the right
funding model is for scientific publications is still up in the air.
Should the government spend taxes enforcing rules whose implications we
do not fully understand? I think not.
The discussions I have seen about this topic seem to focus on the costs
to readers and authors while completely ignoring the economics of
publishing. I hope we can agree that publishers do provide some value in
supporting the scientific process, for example by maintaining archives
of publications for decades and across formats. That value can only be
delivered if ACM et al. have money. Where are they supposed to get it?
The old model of libraries paying ACM subscriptions is dying and is
incompatible with open access. Corporate charity is unreliable and
insufficient. The only other player with an incentive to provide money
is the authors. My understanding is that the economics are forcing ACM
to go in that direction.
I believe ACM Is trying to be a good actor here, unlike publishers that
double-dip by extracting money from both the authors (publication fees)
and the readers (subscription fees); those publishers are doing very
well financially and generating well-earned resentment. My understanding
is that ACM does not want to double-dip. Instead, the idea is that
authors at institutions with ACM subscriptions will pay lower or no fees
for publications. That should keep the total cost to institutions under
control and hopefully approximately cost-neutral. And note that the open
access fees charged to other authors are still much lower than the
author fees charged by other publishers. The journal Nature charges
authors $2000, for example, and it is not the high end.
Best,
Andrew Myers
Gabriel Scherer wrote on 12/21/19 6:01 AM:
[ The Types Forum,
http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
Dear Roberto (and list),
The new ACM Open model is based on the core idea of saving the licensing
revenue of the ACM by shifting costs from their many customers (including
in particular companies) to only the institutions who submit the articles.
They hope that the academic actors that produce the scientific value will
also pay for current ACM expenses. This model is completely incompatible
with having fair Open Access prices for ACM publications; on the contrary,
it would result in a strong total-cost increase for academic entities that
publish in ACM proceedings.
This is frankly explained on the (current version of) the ACM Open
documentation page:
https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess#acmopen
Today, ACM Publications and the ACM Digital Library platform are funded by
selling "read" or "access" licenses to approximately 2,700 universities,
government research labs, and corporations from around the world. The
income generated from the sale of these licenses [...] is approximately
$20M+ annually
The vast majority of [ACM] articles are authored by individuals affiliated
with ~1,000 institutions, which is roughly 1/3 of the institutions that
license “access” to the ACM Digital Library. So, the main challenge for ACM
is how to generate roughly the same income from 1/3 the number of
institutions over the long term, as ACM transitions from selling
institutional "access" to an institutional "OA publication" model and more
and more of the articles published in the ACM DL are published in front of
the subscription paywall.
A transition to fair Open Access practices would require the difficult
decision of giving up on licensing revenue.
The ACM does not seem willing to do it, and cannot be trusted to do it
eventually.
On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 7:08 PM Roberto Di Cosmo <[email protected]>
wrote:
Thanks Gabriel for bringing this to this list: it was indeed shocking to
see ACM
(and many other learned societies) in the list of signatories of this
letter.
The fact that many small learned societies do not feel ready to jump into
a pure
open access model right away does not justify their signature on a letter
containing highly debatable (that's an euphemism) statements like the ones
you pinpoint.
By a curious coincidence, I got almost at the same time an ACM newlsetter
(Blue
Diamond) containing among other announcements, this one:
ACM OPEN: A New Transformative Model for Open Access Publication
Over the past year ACM Publications staff have been working
collaboratively with
a group of large research universities in the United States to
develop an
entirely new and innovative model for Open Access publication that
has the
potential to transition ACM into a predominantly Open Access
publisher over the
next decade or sooner.
You can find details of the proposed model at
https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess#acmopen
Cheers
--
Roberto
On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 02:53:05PM +0100, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
[ The Types Forum,
http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
Dear types-list and SIGPLAN,
I have long been of the opinion that our scientific publications
should be Open Access, and that editors should not request more than
a fair price (cost of publication, which Dasgtuhl estimates at $60
per article). In particular, I believe that copyright transfer
agreements, as imposed by most editors including the ACM, is deeply
unethical: the publishers are not the authors of our scientific
production and they should not force us to give our copyright to
them. A non-exclusive publishing agreement should be enough.
Whether or not you agree with this position, you may be interested in
the content of the following letter to the US White House that
a coalition of scientific publishers, *including the ACM*, signed and
support.
https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/1508/coalitionletteropposinglowerembargoes12.18.2019-581369.pdf
press release from the coalition of editors:
https://newsroom.publishers.org/researchers-and-publishers-oppose-immediate-free-distribution-of-peer-reviewed-journal-articles
(This letter was written in the context of a proposed US legislation
to force more scientists to publish their work in Fair Open Access
venues. I haven't been able to find a precise link to a discussion of
this proposed legislation.)
The following parts of the letter co-signed by the ACM are
particularly juicy:
[We] have learned that the Administration may be preparing to step
into the private marketplace and force the immediate free distribution
of journal articles financed and published by organizations in the
private sector, including many non-profits. This would effectively
nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we
produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for
free.
This mandate [...] would make it very difficult for most American
publishers to invest in publishing these articles. As a consequence,
it would place increased financial responsibility on the government
through diverted federal research grant funds or additional monies
to underwrite the important value added by publishing. In the coming
years, this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new and
additional burden on taxpayers.
In my discussion with many of us, I regularly hear that the ACM is
"not evil" (the SIGPLAN, of course, is pure good!) and that placating
its weird views (for example, that it really does cost $700 or $900 to
publish an article as Open Source) is good for our research
community. It do not see how this argument is compatible with the ACM
signing this letter.
I believe that many of our activities, which we collectively trained
ourselves to see as harmless administrative details of our research
work, are in fact empowering the ACM to make those claims. Should we
accept to give away our copyright, or payน unreasonable
Gold Access author processing charges (APCs)?
น: The SIGPLAN decision to cover APC costs for PACMPL articles is
shielding many of us from paying APCs. But many of the smaller
conferences, symposiums or workshops in our community whose
proceedings are handled by the ACM are still limited to "pay
$900" (or "pay $25 per page") as the only Open Access option, with
copyright transfer as the only free choice, which is effectively
keeping those proceedings Closed-Access.
--
Roberto Di Cosmo
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