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Comment by Mythrl | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the criticism leveled at organizations like IEEE although maybe I'm missing something. These are professional organizations and consequently non-profits. So even though they charge a lot to access the articles, it implies that nobody is actually getting rich off this.

Edit: I know that there are some for profit publishing houses, but there are also many journals published by non-profits (IEEE being one of them).

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Also, "non-profit" only refers to the tax status of the organization. The fact that the organization employs management that may be grossly overcompensated is left unmentioned. In any case, the relationship is likely to be highly - and personally - profitable for the people running it.

Many people are wondering the same thing: because most of the work is done by unpaid third party, the actual cost structure doesn't seem to match their demands. From what I understand, although the publisher is an academic non-profit, they handle the conference and outsource the publishing operation to one of a handful of a for-profit operator, most of whom are Dutch, iirc (Elsevier, Reuters).

nonprofit doesn't guarantee reasonable prices. The Computer Society arm of IEEE boasts 80K members, and over $200 million dollars cash reserves:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/co/200...

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

Read the section "Non-profits are NOT the Answer".

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