[trainyperson]

The financials of open access are interesting.

Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]

Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.

1. https://authors.acm.org/open-access

[zipy124]

The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen quantity over quality.

Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.

[rorytbyrne]

I disagree. We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I think these new incentives are exactly what we want:

1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.

2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.

3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.

[kqr]

> Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers.

That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.

[jojobas]

The whole publication model is broken, not just the incentives. It used to be researchers eager to share their new findings with the few hundred people that could understand them, now it's throngs of PhD students grinding their way to degrees and postdocs trying to secure tenure. The journals are flooded with nonsense and actual researchers resort to word of mouth point out valuable papers to each other.

[strangattractor]

The people that pay are the Institutions (Universities mainly). Not the readers. The publications are sold to them as bundles even if the Institution does not want all the journals.

[beambot]

> Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers

Publishers have a finite capacity based on the number of credible peer reviewers. In the past, it felt very exploitative as an academic doing peer review for the economic benefit of publishing houses. I'd much rather have "public good" publishers with open access -- at least I feel like the "free" labor is aligned with the desired outcome.

[rovr138]

Is it a fee for publication or a fee for reviewing?

Found,

> Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).

[__MatrixMan__]

It still wouldn't be perfect, but I'd like to see a system that rewarded publishers and authors for coming up with work that was a load bearing citation for other work (by different authors on different publishers, i.e. ones with no ulterior motive for having chosen it as a source).

Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.

[zwnow]

You had the quantity argument as well when it was about accumulation of subscribers. As a bigger variety of content also attracts a bigger variety of people.

[nairboon]

The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee.

For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.

[theptip]

Disagree. The journals are now acting like a paid certification. If they admit any old slop, who would pay to submit their papers?

The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions.

Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?

[sheepscreek]

Processing != Publishing (at least I hope not).

[aimanbenbaha]

What about a better deal: Scientific knowledge shouldn't be a for-profit venture to pursue.

[titzer]

As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees.

For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.

Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.

[schlauerfox]

This is on purpose, the industry was forged by someone explicitly trying to get rich off of a public resource. https://podcasts.apple.com/mz/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...

[D-Machine]

Agreed. Also the claims that the fees are for typesetting and the like are highly suspect, given how specific so many journals' formatting requirements are. As poster above says, if they were spending any significant amount of money on typesetting and the like, you wouldn't have strange nags about margins and capitalization and other formatting nonsense, so it is clear they basically do almost nothing on this front.

If they did any serious typesetting, they'd be fine with a simple Markdown or e.g. RMarkdown file, BibTeX and/or other standard format bibliography file, and figures meeting certain specifications, but instead, you often get demands for Word files that meet specific text size and margin requirements, or to use LaTeX templates. There are exceptions to this, of course.

[mmooss]

Are you talking only about conference papers? What about those submitted to Nature, Science, etc.?

And who will curate the best research, especially for people outside your field? I can't follow the discussion in every field.

[RuslanL]

How is $1450 justified in modern times?

Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?

[matwood]

You can look at the finances of the ACM here:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...

[slow_typist]

It isn’t, but to get a full professorship, you need to publish in higher ranked journals. APC-Open-Access is just another iteration of the parasitic business model of the few big publishers. In the end, universities pay the same amounts to the publishers as before, or even more. This business model can only be overcome if and when academia changes the rules for assessment of application to higher ranked academic positions. There are journals that are entirely run by scientists and scientific libraries. Only in this model the peer review and publishing platform becomes a commodity.

[D-Machine]

Laundering prestige. Journals do almost nothing, and serious researchers (by which I mean, people who actually care about advancing knowledge, not careerist academics) haven't cared much about journal prestige for over a decade, at least.

[skirge]

value creation - it's not a hamburger but something serious!

[cs_throwaway]

Surprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)

[woliveirajr]

Didn't expect Brazil being off the "List of Countries Qualifying for APC Waivers"

Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.

[zipy124]

This is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also.

Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil.

[1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/

[coliveira]

These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.

[a3_nm]

I think this APC system is terrible -- it's enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged >$1000.

Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.

[nickwrb]

That’s not the only option, though. There is also institutional membership, which is basically the same as the previous subscription model, just pitched the other way around. Authors whose institutions are members don’t have to pay the processing charge.

Here’s the list of current members: https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants

[ychnd]

This is called "gold open access" and is a scam. It's just journals hijacking the open access initiative and raping it.

[shellac]

> Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC)

Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).

[humanfromearth9]

How do independent researchers, doing research after hours, in the evening or the weekend, finance this?

[quentindanjou]

This is quite a good thing, as you will no longer have to buy all the research papers to advance your own research.

The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you finance that or choose to publish in another journal.

[psychoslave]

I don't, I publish directly on Wikiversity. There it's available to read, use and edit by every follow human with an internet connection. Those willing to contribute with feedback can do so through discussion pages.

[zipy124]

Most reputable journals will waive the fees in this case, though the easier route if you are in a rich country where this is less likely is to partner with an institution. They get to add to their research output stats and you get your funding, a win win.

[jna_sh]

Some journals support “green open access”, where you can share your article minus the journal’s formatting on open repositories etc, sometimes some time after publication, which is usually free. I can’t see any mention of this from the ACM though

[pks016]

You don't :( You look for alternatives. You get discriminated based on wealth

[segmondy]

your website

[bluenose69]

I've been in academia for more decades than I'd like to state, and I have never heard of an institute that covered article processing charges. I work in a natural science. Maybe things are different in computing fields, though.

[cs_throwaway]

The computer science that matters the most today —- machine learning, vision, NLP —- is open access without the fees because the main confs are not ACM. (Vision has some in IEEE.)

I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.