[elehack]

There's a lot to critique in publishing and associated costs, but this tweet is unfortunately factually wrong.

From the linked article, ACM's publication costs are $10.9M, not $33.7M.

One of the ACM's major publication initiatives over the last 3-5 years has been an overhaul of their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive publications in more future-proof formats. There are also the ongoing costs of creating and indexing metadata (ACM tracks more metadata than arXiv, including resolved citations), preservation (ACM buys failsafe perpetual access services from Portico, arXiv has mirrors at other university libraries).

Should it cost $10.9M? I am not sure. Does it cost a lot more than what arXiv does? Yes.

For a costing exercise: the service ACM buys from Portico is archival and republication. If ACM goes insolvent, Portico flips on their archive and the content remains available. How would you price this service, knowing that when it is actually needed, it's because your customer can no longer pay bills, and you now need to take up their hosting (and all related costs) for approximately forever with no further revenue? I think a network of university libraries would be a more cost-effective way to provide this service, but it's the kind of thing that people working on publication and archival professionally think about, and that factors into the cost of professional archival-level publication.

(I cannot speak to IEEE.)

[chrisseaton]

> their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive publications in more future-proof formats

Publication workflow, formatting and accessibility? For every paper I’ve done I just send the ACM a final PDF produced myself from a LaTeX template that hasn’t changed in years. What’s the workflow for taking an already final PDF from authors and uploading it to a file server?

[elehack]

That workflow has changed in the last few years.

- Brand new templates (introduced about 5 years ago, the LaTeX template has had multiple updates per year since then)

- Workflow that makes use of the source (or possibly codes the source embeds in the PDF, but you have to provide LaTeX source to ACM these days)

- Papers now render in both PDF and HTML (and the HTML looks quite good), this started showing up within the last 1-2 years

- Papers are archived in an XML-based format (something called JITS, I do not know details) to facilitate rendering to PDF, HTML, ePub, and other formats not yet devised

[Vinnl]

I'm not sure how it works at ACM, but often, it's people retyping the contents of your article into a JATS-XML template and adding additional metadata (authors, date of publication, perhaps who funded it, etc.), which is then used to generate several outputs (e.g. PDF, HTML, but also citation lists, etc.).

[jph00]

Thank you for the correction.

IEEE's $193m is where we should focus our attention, when it comes to this expense line.

[elehack]

I agree. I have no idea what IEEE is doing that costs that much. And while I don't take as hard a line against them as I do against Elsevier, I have never published with them and don't currently have any plans to change that.

[jcranmer]

I'm not sure how many articles are published a year in ACM [1], but the answer seems to be a few 10,000s. That's a per-article publishing cost of a few hundred dollars, which is not unrealistic to me.

[1] The ACM Digital Library claims 2.8 million published over 84 years, or about 33,000/year if divided equally over the years (which is laughably false). Some number of that quantity may include citations for keynotes or posters, which aren't really research papers, but I don't have a good handle on that rate.

[julierthanjulie]

Annual report 2019 gives some details - 34,000 full text articles were published in the DL. This will exclude non-archival content like keynotes, posters, etc if conference organisers provide correct metadata.