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Comment by drallison | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

It's not just about professional management. I suspect IEEE and ACM have much more complicated infrastructure to handle submission, peer review, production, etc., which arXiv doesn't have. I'm not justifying the costs -- I wouldn't be able to do that unless I see the breakdown of costs, e.g., how much it goes to the society, how much it goes to post-production, etc. I would also assume that ACM and IEEE journals also do a bit of copy editing that goes beyond mere spell checks before publishing the articles. Although copy editing and post-production is generally outsourced, it is still expensive. All this adds to the cost.

We don't need to speculate how much it costs to run a world class journal. The cost above arxiv is 15$ per Submission:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

IEEE charges 1700$+

Correction, "Our total costs probably average about $30 per accepted article." https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/post/40 And that seems to be as bare bones as one can do, as they don't proofread and Scholastica is only used for peer review costing 10$ per submission.

I was quoting the number for submitted articles from Gowers blog, your number is accepted. Also, proofreading at publishers basically doesn't happen any more. And even if it would, it certainly doesn't account for the difference in price, not even remotely close.

You can call it bare bones, but as a scientist, it is very hard to see what value IEEE adds above this "bare bones" approach.

> Also, proofreading at publishers basically doesn't happen any more.

I'm sorry, but which publishers are you talking about here? I've published with several publishers in my field (physics) including APS, AIP, AAS, EPS, Springer, etc., and almost all of them do moderate to extensive copy editing, even for journals that aren't exactly high-impact.

> it certainly doesn't account for the difference in price, not even remotely close.

This is of course true, and I agree. But starting an argument against conventional journals by comparing their costs of operation with that of a preprint repository is disingenuous. And that is where I take issue.

But it's really not disingenuous. They simply don't provide value for money. They are, in economic terms, rentiers. Arxiv isn't all of the cost, but the arxiv costs are order of magnitude accurate, that's what Gowers showed. In physics JHEP is a good example of a high class arxiv overlay journal that is extremely successful without APCs.

The IOP and DPG with NJP also charge half of what IEEE Access do, and they are among the journals that actually provide some copy editing. As far as I recall my publications with the APS did not have any substantial proof reading done.

I actually think proof reading is a really valuable service, and I would be happy to pay for it optionally or in a transparent fashion. But even with proof reading we don't get to 1000s of dollars.

My understanding from talking to editors is that for professional societies, journal income subsidises other activities. Which is fine, but I would like to see that transparently declared. "APC 150$, Contribution to other IEEE activities 1500$". Structurally it's also questionable that library budgets should finance professional societies, but that's really the least of my concerns.

> In physics JHEP is a good example of a high class arxiv overlay journal that is extremely successful without APCs.

I don't think JHEP is an overlay journal anymore. AFAIK, JHEP is now published by SISSA/Springer with funds from CERN/SCOAP. SCOAP also pays for most articles in Phys. Lett. B and some articles in Phys. Rev. D. But SCOAP probably doesn't pay for open access as much as individual authors would have to.

> As far as I recall my publications with the APS did not have any substantial proof reading done.

APS did do a moderate amount of copyediting when I published with them in 2015. They (and most publishers) also check papers for plagiarism, and it's my understanding that the third-party services that they use for this charge a hefty fee [1]. arXiv only compares submissions with existing preprints on arXiv and not other journals.

> My understanding from talking to editors is that for professional societies, journal income subsidises other activities. Which is fine, but I would like to see that transparently declared.

I totally agree with the sentiment that most publishers charge way more than they should for open-access options. Premium open-access-only journals like Phys. Rev. X and Nat. Comm. are also problematic since it discourages authors who have smaller budgets and grants from submitting their papers to these journals.

[1] https://www.ithenticate.com/products

That's an unfair comparison. Discrete Analysis is an arXiv-overlay journal, IEEE hosts its own articles. Plus, Discrete Analysis doesn't typeset or proofread the articles it publishes. Again, I'm not justifying the exorbitant prices that most journals charge to publish using an open access option, all I'm saying is that it's unfair to compare arXiv with an actual academic journal. A preprint repository is in no way equivalent to an academic journal.

Arxiv hosting costs were posted elsewhere and are minimal. Less than the 30$ per published article that DA requires on top. From memory: <10$ per year per published article.

So we have roughly 1660$ unaccounted for for IEEE. PRX costs 4000$.

> I suspect IEEE and ACM have much more complicated infrastructure to handle submission, peer review, production, etc.,

To the tune of a hundred million dollars? I can’t even remotely imagine how. If someone asked you to design a system to do all of those above things, would you actually come to the conclusion it’d cost a cool hundred mil yearly to operate?

I'd actually like to see a breakdown of IEEE costs. AFAIK, IEEE offers print-editions of several of its journals. I don't know who reads hard copies of journals these days, but I'm sure printing on actual physical paper would add to operating costs.

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...)

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.

It's quite clear how you can rationalize it:

* to advance your career you need to publish in certain specific journals

* 5 grand is a reasonable amount of money to advance your career

therefore:

* it is reasonable to pay 5 grands to publish on such a journal

PLOS ONE’s fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn’t seem inexplainable to me. That’s “Springer Nature Blood Cancer Journal”, so factors of 1½ in “better editing”, “older, less efficient systems” and “fewer publications/year, so lower efficiency of scale” could already do it.

Also, is Nature working on digitizing old content? That can be costly (I remember reading somewhere that it could involve a) finding a library that has a copy and b) flying there to photograph it) and that’s a cost PLOS won’t ever have.

> PLOS ONE’s fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn’t seem inexplainable to me.

You need to first explain why PLOS ONE is an appropriate baseline. A world class Open Access journal costs roughly $10 per submission [0]. Most arguments I have seen using PLOS ONE as a baseline, talk about the "non profit" part of PLOS. It has to be stressed here at that "non profit" doesn't mean PLOS works on a "non profit" business model. It just means that they generate profit AND the profit isn't distributed to its members, directors or officers [1].

[0] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non-profit_organizations

They probably mean administration of a peer review. Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

[1] There are now tools that automate and speed up finding peer reviewers, though, like https://www.prophy.science/referee-finder

> Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

All done by volunteers!

> Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

This is done by the Program Chairs of the conference who are professors at universities. ACM doesn't do or pay anything for it.

> surprise surprise--different costs

The surprise is NOT that the costs are different. The surprise is the order of magnitude of the difference. The surprise is also the absolute value of the cost of IEEE given it's apparent activity.

I have no idea if the massive spending on IEEE is reasonable given I have no insight into their org. I do agree the size of the costs as associated with the activities is suspicious.

It's fine to think that the IEEE cost is too high for the value provided, but there's no reason to measure it with respect to a baseline defined by the arXiv. The arXiv is literally just an automated system pushing bits around (plus some unpaid volunteers who do light moderating).

Likewise, I might think the person employed at the post office gets paid too much relative to the value they provide, but it would be silly to compare their salary cost to the maintenance cost of a blue steel Post Office box on the corner. ("Their health insurance alone costs 1000x the annual price of blue paint!")

> publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited

That's done by the community - ACM don't fund that. They just run the conferences (which are paid and ticketed so presumably fund themselves) and host the paper files.

Not to defend the price differential, but someone has to solicit reviewers and manage the review process. This is going to roughly track the number of submissions and isn't free.

> someone has to solicit reviewers and manage the review process

Lol that’s done by volunteer community members as well. It literally is free to the ACM (but the people are paid to do it by their institutions as part of their jobs.)

Your lol is misinformed. ACM and IEEE produce and print actual dead-tree journals. This means selecting a fixed number of articles which are consistently formatted by an editorial process. Additionally, [edited to qualify: some but not all] IEEE Associate Editors are paid positions. Arxiv is not doing this.

We can argue/debate about what is the value-add (and precise workflow difference) of the IEEE editorial process vs. arxiv, but there is a difference.

Like the comment you responded to, I'm not defending the precise differential. I'm a past IEEE member (and author, and reviewer) and found their membership fees excessive.

> Your lol is misinformed.

In every ACM review committee I’ve participated in, it’s just volunteer members of the community emailing other other and using open source software to coordinate reviews.

I think all of the ACM conferences I contribute to have stopped actually printing physical proceedings. The consistent formatting is by a LaTeX document class, with an automated system that checks for bad fonts, text going into the margin, etc. The PDF that ends up in the Digital Library is the one the author submits (possibly with a watermark or stamp applied). I don't know if there is a small amount of ACM-provided human labour employed somewhere, but mostly they just provide a small amount of automation.

$193 million would get you 1000 employees at $193,000 a head.

Even taking into account overheads like desk space and pensions, that's a very large number of very well paid employees for basic secretarial work like soliciting reviewers

IEEE at our college would send a significant amount of money for the student org. In addition the student fee likely did not even cover the basic costs of access provided by third parties, etc.

They also have conferences, etc. to students, were the student fees almost certainly don’t cover the costs.

Their expenses may be too high, but the comparison to arxiv is not helpful.

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.

Indeed, it costs very little to run a good quality journal and there's a growing network of them owned and managed by the scholarly community itself: https://freejournals.org/

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