[ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
I also received off-list the confirmation that Springer OA prices for ETAPS are not public, but that they are in the $100-$200 range. It's interesting that Springer's *price* is in line with the ACM publication *costs* for conference proceedings (without counting ACM DL costs). On Sat, Jun 5, 2021 at 8:39 AM Gabriel Scherer <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear list, > > I was pointed off-list to the following interesting article from 2020, the > first attempt by ACM to provide some sort of public financial information. > > CACM: ACM Publications Finances > > https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/5/244322-acm-publications-finances/fulltext > > The report is interesting, and it suggests that the costs of publishing at > ACM are quite high. Some details below. (Those are all 2019 numbers) > > - There is a staggering difference in per-article cost between "ACM > journals" and "conference proceedings". According to this data, ACM Journal > cost on average $1500 per article, while conference proceedings cost of > $151 per article. In particular, the data reports that each ACM journal > article spends $333 (on average) on "composition and copy-editing". > My uninformed guess would be that PACML, while being nominally a > journal, is still handled by conference-proceedings processes: I have > published in conference proceedings and then PACMPL, and not observed any > change that would correspond to a ten-fold cost increase. > > - ACM reports a conference proceeding cost of $151 per article. In the > blog post, they report it as $410, but in fact much of that figure > corresponds to ACM revenue that they give to SIGs and include in the "cost > of publication" of the SIG. (It's great that ACM makes revenue and that > they fund the SIGs, but we are trying to understand publishing costs.) > > - None of the figure above include the ACM Digital Library (web hosting + > long-term archiving), whose cost in 2019 were massive: $299 per conference > proceeding publication on average. The post has more details on that: 2019 > was right after they launched the "new DL" platform, so a share of these > costs are fixed and will not recur on following years. But they also expect > to host more video content (indeed), so some other costs will increase. > > Note that arxiv has costs of $14 per article, and Zenodo offers > long-term archiving of gigabyte-large content for free as a public service > ( https://help.zenodo.org/ ; this is supported as a "drop in the bucket" > of CERN physicists costs archiving petabytes of experiment data. We use > Zenodo to host the artifacts submitted to the Artifact Evaluation processes > of several SIGPLAN conferences. ) > ACM should let authors choose to publish on the ACM DL *or* on > Arxiv+Zenodo; the people who see value in ACM DL could choose this option, > and the others would vastly reduce hosting/archiving costs (from $299 to > $14). > > - The revenue/costs numbers for ACM ICPS are interesting (International > Conference Proceeding Series: as a non-ACM conference you can contract ACM > to publish your proceedings, for a small per-paper price, in exchange for > forcing your authors to give up their copyright to the ACM; several > conferences of our community do this, for example PPDP). In 2019 they > brought $362K of revenue in publication fees, for about $250K of publishing > costs¹. > And the ICPS publishing fees are pretty reasonable! See the fee > structure at https://www.acm.org/publications/icps-series : for one > edition of proceedings, you pay $750 of fixed costs for up to 30 articles, > plus $20 for each paper above the 30th. > If ACM makes a net profit with just those fees (the revenue figure is > just for publication fees, it does not include subscriptions, pay-per-view > etc.), this means that our ACM conferences could pay *exactly this price* > for (Open Access) proceeding publications and not cost ACM any money, in > fact bring revenue. (This only covers publishing costs, not ACM DL costs.) > > ¹: ACM gives a figure of $215K ofr ICPS publishing costs, but it has not > estimated overhead expense, so the figure is an under-estimate. We can > estimate this cost. ICPS publishes on average 255 papers per year since > 2002; optimistically assuming 1000 papers in 2019, if the overhead costs > are proportional to the other conference proceeding overehead cost, this > adds another $34K, for a total cost of $250K. > > On Sun, May 30, 2021 at 6:52 PM Gabriel Scherer <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Dear list, >> >> Today I found out about JOSS, the Journal of Open Source Software ( >> https://joss.theoj.org/ ), an interesting journal in itself, which has a >> stunning "Cost and sustainability model" webpage section: >> https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs >> >> For more stunning details, go read their more detailed blog post, "Cost >> models for running an online open journal" : ) >> >> http://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-an-online-open-journal >> >> (Meanwhile in ACM land, we are still waiting for basic financial >> transparency on paper publishing costs -- not that, say, ETAPS or JFP are >> doing any better. >> LIPIcs describes how they calculated their publishing costs at >> https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publications/lipics/processing-charge/ , and >> LMCS ( https://lmcs.episciences.org/ ) is now using a publicly-funded OA >> publishing platform, so they may actually have no costs at all.) >> >> Cheers >> >
