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Comment by denzil_correa | 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

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.

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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.

> 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.

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$.

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