[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)