[ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
Hi,
I'm not on that list. And yes, I studied it. My conclusion at the time
was that the little money that the DL generates, that is not to pay the
sales and support staff who works for the DL, is for supporting the
publication of journals, which don't have revenue. This was a ballpark,
reverse engineering assessment by looking at the ACM tax returns and the
letter that John White sent us explaining the publication costs.
Unfortunately, the DL ties up the conference papers (and now the PACM
papers) with the ACM journals. The costs of the former are almost 100%
covered by conference registration fees. And yet, they get hidden behind
the paywall, because the ACM sells the DL-as-product to the libraries,
and the more content, the more valuable it is. The ACM would have a very
weak product if it sold only the journals.
Best,
Crista
On 12/22/2019 2:48 PM, Derek Dreyer wrote:
Further, ACM does many positive things beyond archiving articles.
According to Crista Lopes on Twitter (I'm not sure if she's on this list):
"I studied @TheOfficialACM’s finances a few years ago, when I was
Treasurer of SIGPLAN. As far as I can tell, the ACM DL paywall is a
small business whose revenue serves entirely to pay the staff who
works for it — sales and support ppl. Very little of it flows
elsewhere... As far as I can tell, the ACM could operate based only
on conferences’ revenue, and ditch the paywall entirely, and
everything good would still happen — staff and all. But that would
mean getting rid of the DL staff. Whose salaries come [from] the DL
paywall."
Derek
Since Arxiv is currently largely supported by Cornell University along
with the Simons Foundation, I appreciate the callout. But its costs are
also increasing dramatically. Further, ACM does many positive things
beyond archiving articles.
-- Andrew
Gabriel Scherer wrote on 12/22/19 12:52 PM:
Dear Andrew (and list),
I believe open access is a goal for ACM
This is what the ACM says, but this is not their actions suggest. Some
examples:
1. They signed this letter. (They defend their choice in
https://www.acm.org/about-acm/opposition-to-zero-embargo-mandate )
2. Events affiliated with an ACM conference, such as a workshop, are
not allowed to publish their proceedings as (fair) open-access if they
wish to, for example by publishing in ETCS or LiPICS. (I know from my
experience with the ML and OCaml workshops that ACM people check this
and enforce this rule.)
3. According to private communication with ETAPS organizers, the Gold
Open Access deal offered by Springer costs *less* per paper for ETAPS
than the Open Access model that SIGPLAN generously funds for PACMPL.
If you're doing worse than Springer at Open Access, you are probably
not trying very hard.
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.
According to LiPICS (the fair Open Access publishing arm of Schloss
Dagstuhl), their edition/typesetting work costs 60€ per article (
https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publications/lipics/processing-charge/ ).
(In any case, ACM outsources their edition work on proceedings to
external companies, that if I understand correctly are budgeted as
part of the conference organization, so not paid by ACM itself.)
According to arXiv, their long-term archival platform costs <$7 per
article ( https://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper#21-budget ).
On Sun, Dec 22, 2019 at 3:46 PM Andrew Myers <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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]> <mailto:[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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Cristina Videira Lopes
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Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
