This is good, but they're now charging authors a publishing fee of over $1000 per article (and they say that that is the discounted price). It is unclear whether this is justified. In my experience publishing scientific articles with ACM, all the real work (such as peer review) is done by volunteers. From what I can tell, ACM just hosts the exact PDF + metadata that authors supply. I suspect that in the future, more journals and conferences will switch to an arXiv-overlay model.
I have volunteered in various roles for ACM conferences and thus have some insight into ACM's path towards Open Access over the past years.
Just a few things to consider:
- ACM is not a for-profit publisher like Springer or Elsevier. Any profits made from their/our publishing activities subsidize e.g., outreach activities, travel stipends for developing countries, and potential losses from e.g. conferences.
- In my experience, ACM is one of the very few publishers in computer science where you can generally trust the published papers.
- Keeping a long-term digital library is not just "putting PDFs on a server" but involves a lot of additional costs. The ACM HQ is rather lean IMHO, but there are multiple people involved in developing the Digital Library, handling cases of copyright infringement and plagiarism, supporting volunteers, etc. Also, the ACM DL contains a rising number of video recordings of conference talks, etc. Additionally, there are several contractors to be paid. For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara.
- In the past, subscriptions to the ACM Digital Library were a major, stable source of income for ACM. ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.
I don’t see what the benefit of most of that is, and why publication fees are a good way to pay for it. Take video recordings: why should we pay for them to develop a video hosting platform when perfectly good ones exist? In fact, conferences that I am familiar with put the recordings on YouTube, and this works great.
> ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.
The attitude that the work of science belongs to these publishers is what grates me the most. Yes, ACM is not as bad as Elsevier, but this attitude is still fundamentally wrong. They are in the position they are mostly by historical accident, able to extract rents because it requires a lot of coordination to switch.
Why do I call it rent extraction despite the ACM doing stuff? Suppose the ACM charged separately for using their video platform. Would anyone pay for that?
> For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara
And what good is that? Why should we pay for a separate company to run pdflatex for us? The system exists primarily to check that we’ve put ACM branding in the paper.
Sometimes people also say that the real service is long term storage of pdfs, but let me preempt that right now: there are government sponsored long term storage facilities like Zenodo that are likely to outlast ACM. Second, commercial storage paid for indefinitely using an annuity would cost less than $1 in present value for hosting the pdfs of a conference, about 0.0001% of ACM publication fees.
It doesn't. arXiv is exclusively a pre-print service. The ACM digital library is for peer-reviewed, published papers. All of the peer-review happens through the ACM, as well as the physical conferences where people present and publish their papers.
Yes, and that peer review happens through the ACM. It serves an organizing function. The conferences themselves are also in-person events, and most of the important research papers come out of those conferences.
I'm pretty sure the primary purpose of the $1000 is just to create some small gate to avoid overloading reviewers/ACM. There are probably other mechanisms that could be used - such as having "recommendations" for from already approved researchers - I think arXiv has something like that.
That isn't the case. Conferences organize their own website to submit articles for review. Volunteers from the conference pre-filter submitted articles for spam, the rest is handled by the review committee.
There is no cost to submit. In fact, the eventual cost is often not even mentioned at that point. When the article is accepted for publication, the conference gives authors a link to an ACM website where the authors upload their PDFs. Only after that will the authors be asked to pay the fee (and if you wanted, you could refuse at that point, which presumably means that the conference will eat the loss, or maybe they'll un-publish your article).
I don't think spam is a huge issue. The conference websites and submission portals are niche and random people don't tend to find them or care enough to go through the trouble.
