[HN Gopher] ACM Costs vs. Archive.org Costs
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       ACM Costs vs. Archive.org Costs
        
       Author : luu
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2020-01-21 02:08 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | getpolarized wrote:
       | What are the costs here... 25M downloads per month doesn't seem
       | like it should cost $100k per month. Must be total archive size I
       | imagine?
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | The big difference is that the acm spends a few million of that
       | on politicians to keep it that way, but Arxiv doesn't have the
       | money to do that.
        
       | jph00 wrote:
       | I wrote this tweet. Wasn't sure anyone would read it - glad it's
       | got noticed, because I do think it's an important issue!
       | 
       | I'd love to know where that money at IEEE and ACM is going. The
       | annual reports don't make it at all clear, unfortunately.
       | Obviously, there are for-profit publishers where the money is
       | simply going to huge profit margins. But that's not the case for
       | professional societies.
       | 
       | One thing I noticed when I had to sign up to ACM for a conference
       | a few years ago was that I got harangued by sales-people from ACM
       | for months afterwards, trying to get me on a call to have me buy
       | more expensive memberships. It wasn't an automated system - it
       | was an actual person, trying to get me onto an actual phone call
       | with them. It occurred to me at the time that that must be very
       | expensive, yet it's still a profitable thing for them to do - so
       | there's clearly a lot of money changing hands...
       | 
       | I don't think this is a good sign. Perhaps the professional
       | societies can openly publish a full breakdown of what they're
       | spending money on?
        
       | dvanduzer wrote:
       | (arxiv.org is not archive.org if someone wants to fix the title.
       | both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though.)
        
         | AceJohnny2 wrote:
         | > _both are absurd creations that can 't possibly exist,
         | though._
         | 
         | How so?
        
           | dhosek wrote:
           | irony
        
           | bordercases wrote:
           | It was an endearing comment.
        
       | drallison wrote:
       | This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are
       | posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of
       | publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited.
       | They serve different needs and have--surprise surprise--different
       | costs.
        
         | jph00 wrote:
         | 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...)
        
           | denzil_correa wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | denzil_correa wrote:
         | > This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are
         | posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of
         | publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited
         | 
         | I have been a reviewer of many ACM, Elsevier etc. conferences.
         | The reviewers, editors don't get any money for their service.
         | Regardless, "professional management" is not a sufficient
         | argument for 33x / 190x the price difference . IEEE annual
         | spend $92M in people costs and I doubt a single $ of it goes to
         | any of these peer reviews or editors.
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | You can host a peer-reviewed selection of papers as an
         | "Overlay" over an open-access archive such as arxiv.org, at
         | trivial cost. Closed-access journals don't even fund their
         | peer-reviewers generally, so it's not like the "overlay"
         | journal would be offering a worse deal from that POV.
        
       | zozbot234 wrote:
       | Is arxiv.org mirrored on archive.org? The latter has its Wayback
       | Machine of course, but that might not necessarily follow .ps and
       | .pdf links.
        
         | bordercases wrote:
         | Wayback Machine crawls files as well as pages.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2020-01-21 23:00 UTC)