Leaving aside for-profit publishers, I dont' get what the point of ACM and IEEE is. Those are non-profit bodies and dominate the majority of publishing in CS/EE. Aside from a handful of big venues like NIPS, VLDB, Usenix, almost everything is tied to ACM/IEEE. Why do we need them and what value do they add ? Also, what is a non-profit ? You can keep pumping all the money you make into salaries and other assets that you own. Is that all it takes to be a non-profit?
These societies are run and composed of by academics themselves. In fact, the executive salaries are $0 as far as I know, so it's a volunteer organization.
It's basically how publishing would work if academics take control away from commercial publishers, i.e. the post-disruption publishing arrangement that people in this thread are cheering for. Authors generally have the option to keep the copyright of the papers when publishing for ACM, and at least host the papers on their homepages.
This is a good thing that they dominate CS/EE as they have more reasonable access costs, and many academics no longer have to publish at commercial publishers. It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing, but it's the best option I can think of for now.
I have no way of verifying this, but clearly the money is going somewhere and it's not publishing.
>It's basically how publishing would work if academics take control away from commercial publishers
arxiv is closer to how publishing would or should work if academics were entirely in charge. Publishing only entails putting a pdf up. All the peer review process is orthogonal which is done for free by everyone involved.
>Authors generally have the option to keep the copyright of the papers when publishing for ACM, and at least host the papers on their homepages.
You do not retain the copyright, and the only permission you get is to share it for classroom use with some other constraints. Authors posting them on their university websites is a grey area that is likely non compliant but it would be really bad PR for ACM to go after such instances. More recently, ACM has started allowing authors to pay some exorbitant fee to make the paper open access.
>This is a good thing that they dominate CS/EE as they have more reasonable access costs
Actually, there isn't really a big difference between the access costs. For most of the world, it's infinite. It doesn't matter if Elsevier is trying to charge $100 for a paper and ACM is trying to charge $30. Or what deals they make with libraries. It's all infinite for anyone not affiliated with a university in a western country.
>It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing
The amortized cost of putting a pdf on the internet is close to 0. This is already true with arxiv. And even if you do not want to use arxiv, a static website with s3 or the new cloudflare equivalent will cost pennies per pdf.
Sorry for a back-and-forth replies, but I don't want readers to be misled:
> You do not retain the copyright, and the only permission you get is to share it for classroom use with some other constraints. Authors posting them on their university websites is a grey area that is likely non compliant but it would be really bad PR for ACM to go after such instances.
See https://authors.acm.org/author-services/author-rights the options that authors have, including "Authors who prefer to retain copyright of their work can sign an exclusive licensing agreement, which gives ACM the right but not the obligation to defend the work against improper use by third parties."
>> It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing
> The amortized cost of putting a pdf on the internet is close to 0.
Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service. The publishing process (including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf. You're welcome to review the non-profit filings for ACM/IEEE if you're genuinely interested in what the money is spent on.
And you're always able to upload your pdf to arXiv regardless of what you do with ACM, "an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv" [https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess]
>Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work can choose ACM's author-pays option, which allows for perpetual open access through the ACM Digital Library
So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ?
This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide. Whether you satisfy the personal and classroom requirement is not clear. It is also not clear what agreement you signed with ACM. And you certainly cannot publish this under a different license because
>Please note that the right to assign a CC-BY license to the published Version of Record of the Work requires either the payment of an APC or an affiliation with an institution that participates in the ACM Open program
>Including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf
And this is the crux of the issue. Nobody is compensated for this in the review cycle. So why is the cost of the final product so astronomical ?
>Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service.
I don't get this argument. AirBnB has a different product. That's why I mentioned the cost of AWS S3 and R2, which is literally what you would pay to host things.
> So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ?
Tangential, though at a recent SIGPLAN conference, the cost to authors to licence under CC-BY was listed at 400USD. In place was "The article processing charge (APC) is to be paid anyway for all PACMPL articles, and ACM SIGPLAN covers it if you cannot afford it. Your paper will be open access no matter which kind of publishing-rights agreement you choose.".
That said, from what I can tell, most of the main programming languages conferences have far better systems and communities in place than many other fields (a lot of open access, double blind reviews, etc.).
At the very least, I hope that all the top conferences (e.g., the ones in http://csrankings.org/) become open access by default at no additional cost to authors. There are a lot of strange discrepancies even between sister conferences. For example, VLDB is open access, but SIGMOD isn't. It's all the same people in both conferences.
> This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide
The "Post" section of the page linked by lazyjeff says:
>Otherwise known as "Self-Archiving" or "Posting Rights", all ACM published authors of magazine articles, journal articles, and conference papers retain the right to post the pre-submitted (also known as "pre-prints"), submitted, accepted, and peer-reviewed versions of their work in any and all of the following sites:
> Author's Homepage
> ...
So posting a PDF of the "accepted version" to a personal website is not a "grey area" - it is explicitly permitted by the ACM.
This is the usual situation: authors retain the rights to put the "accepted" version on their homepage. This includes all the changes made in response to reviewer comments, but is formatted by the author rather than the publisher.
Unless they have selected an open-access option (which usually requires paying a fee), they typically do not have the rights to post the "publisher formatted" version. However, in fields like CS the submitted version is usually produced using a LaTeX template for the journal so looks very similar to the publisher-formatted version; the main differences are often things like the journal name and page numbers written in the headers and footers.
For lazyjeff's example, you can compare the version on his homepage [1] with the version on the ACM DL [2], and see that they look quite similar, but one obvious difference is the formatting of the last page: in the author-formatted version, the left column fills the full height of the page, and the right column is shorter; in the published version the left column is shortened so that both columns are the same height.
I maintain that this is a grey area that has not been tested in courts, mainly because ACM would not pursue something like this. In a copyright lawsuit, it is not obvious to me that a judge would agree with your conclusion that slight differences in formatting make it "not the published version". INAL, but to me, the mention of ACM on the paper is itself problematic from a copyright standpoint.
Of course, the larger point I'm making in all this is that this is completely unnecessary and regressive.
I can't say whether or not they are worth it, but they provide some degree of branding, mainly to "adjacent" communities. If I see a paper in IEEE something, I have some degree of assurance that there is a minimum quality level, even if I'm not that familiar with the area.
Also, at least for IEEE, they provide some help with running the conference, publishing the proceedings, etc.
Whether or not they provide value commensurate with their cost is a separate question.
This is a bit like the app store scenario. Sure, if you are a lesser known conference, having ACM/IEEE probably helps you. It really doesn't help any established conference similar to how the Apple store doesn't help Netflix.
