[TYPES] In a letter to the US White House, ACM opposes free distribution of peer-reviewed journal articles

[Andrew Myers]

It feels a bit facile to bash the ACM for signing onto this letter. The 
letter does not mean that they oppose making publications freely 
available; in fact, I believe open access is a goal for ACM. The letter 
means that they oppose having the government *mandate* that all 
scientific publishers operate in this way. Exactly what the right 
funding model is for scientific publications is still up in the air. 
Should the government spend taxes enforcing rules whose implications we 
do not fully understand? I think not.

The discussions I have seen about this topic seem to focus on the costs 
to readers and authors while completely ignoring the economics of 
publishing. I hope we can agree that publishers do provide some value in 
supporting the scientific process, for example by maintaining archives 
of publications for decades and across formats. That value can only be 
delivered if ACM et al. have money. Where are they supposed to get it? 
The old model of libraries paying ACM subscriptions is dying and is 
incompatible with open access. Corporate charity is unreliable and 
insufficient. The only other player with an incentive to provide money 
is the authors. My understanding is that the economics are forcing ACM 
to go in that direction.

I believe ACM Is trying to be a good actor here, unlike publishers that 
double-dip by extracting money from both the authors (publication fees) 
and the readers (subscription fees); those publishers are doing very 
well financially and generating well-earned resentment. My understanding 
is that ACM does not want to double-dip. Instead, the idea is that 
authors at institutions with ACM subscriptions will pay lower or no fees 
for publications. That should keep the total cost to institutions under 
control and hopefully approximately cost-neutral. And note that the open 
access fees charged to other authors are still much lower than the 
author fees charged by other publishers. The journal Nature charges 
authors $2000, for example, and it is not the high end.

Best,

Andrew Myers

Gabriel Scherer wrote on 12/21/19 6:01 AM:
> [ The Types Forum, 
> http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
>
> Dear Roberto (and list),
>
> The new ACM Open model is based on the core idea of saving the licensing
> revenue of the ACM by shifting costs from their many customers (including
> in particular companies) to only the institutions who submit the articles. 
>
> They hope that the academic actors that produce the scientific value will
> also pay for current ACM expenses. This model is completely incompatible
> with having fair Open Access prices for ACM publications; on the contrary, 
>
> it would result in a strong total-cost increase for academic entities that 
>
> publish in ACM proceedings.
>
> This is frankly explained on the (current version of) the ACM Open
> documentation page:
> https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess#acmopen
>
>> Today, ACM Publications and the ACM Digital Library platform are funded by 
>>
>> selling "read" or "access" licenses to approximately 2,700 universities,
>> government research labs, and corporations from around the world. The
>> income generated from the sale of these licenses [...] is approximately
>> $20M+ annually
>>
> The vast majority of [ACM] articles are authored by individuals affiliated 
>
>> with ~1,000 institutions, which is roughly 1/3 of the institutions that
>> license “access” to the ACM Digital Library. So, the main challenge for ACM 
>>
>> is how to generate roughly the same income from 1/3 the number of
>> institutions over the long term, as ACM transitions from selling
>> institutional "access" to an institutional "OA publication" model and more 
>>
>> and more of the articles published in the ACM DL are published in front of 
>>
>> the subscription paywall.
>>
> A transition to fair Open Access practices would require the difficult
> decision of giving up on licensing revenue.
> The ACM does not seem willing to do it, and cannot be trusted to do it
> eventually.
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 7:08 PM Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto at dicosmo.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Gabriel for bringing this to this list: it was indeed shocking to
>> see ACM
>> (and many other learned societies) in the list of signatories of this
>> letter.
>>
>> The fact that many small learned societies do not feel ready to jump into 
>>
>> a pure
>> open access model right away does not justify their signature on a letter 
>>
>> containing highly debatable (that's an euphemism) statements like the ones 
>>
>> you pinpoint.
>>
>> By a curious coincidence, I got almost at the same time an ACM newlsetter 
>>
>> (Blue
>> Diamond) containing among other announcements, this one:
>>
>>      ACM OPEN: A New Transformative Model for Open Access Publication
>>
>>       Over the past year ACM Publications staff have been working
>> collaboratively with
>>       a group of large research universities in the United States to
>> develop an
>>       entirely new and innovative model for Open Access publication that
>> has the
>>       potential to transition ACM into a predominantly Open Access
>> publisher over the
>>       next decade or sooner.
>>
>> You can find details of the proposed model at
>> https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess#acmopen
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> -- 
>> Roberto
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 02:53:05PM +0100, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
>>> [ The Types Forum,
>> http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
>>> Dear types-list and SIGPLAN,
>>>
>>> I have long been of the opinion that our scientific publications
>>> should be Open Access, and that editors should not request more than
>>> a fair price (cost of publication, which Dasgtuhl estimates at $60
>>> per article). In particular, I believe that copyright transfer
>>> agreements, as imposed by most editors including the ACM, is deeply
>>> unethical: the publishers are not the authors of our scientific
>>> production and they should not force us to give our copyright to
>>> them. A non-exclusive publishing agreement should be enough.
>>>
>>> Whether or not you agree with this position, you may be interested in
>>> the content of the following letter to the US White House that
>>> a coalition of scientific publishers, *including the ACM*, signed and
>>> support.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/1508/coalitionletteropposinglowerembargoes12.18.2019-581369.pdf 
>>
>>>    press release from the coalition of editors:
>>>
>> https://newsroom.publishers.org/researchers-and-publishers-oppose-immediate-free-distribution-of-peer-reviewed-journal-articles 
>>
>>> (This letter was written in the context of a proposed US legislation
>>> to force more scientists to publish their work in Fair Open Access
>>> venues. I haven't been able to find a precise link to a discussion of
>>> this proposed legislation.)
>>>
>>> The following parts of the letter co-signed by the ACM are
>>> particularly juicy:
>>>
>>>> [We] have learned that the Administration may be preparing to step
>>>> into the private marketplace and force the immediate free distribution
>>>> of journal articles financed and published by organizations in the
>>>> private sector, including many non-profits. This would effectively
>>>> nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we
>>>> produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for
>>>> free.
>>>> This mandate [...] would make it very difficult for most American
>>>> publishers to invest in publishing these articles. As a consequence,
>>>> it would place increased financial responsibility on the government
>>>> through diverted federal research grant funds or additional monies
>>>> to underwrite the important value added by publishing. In the coming
>>>> years, this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new and
>>>> additional burden on taxpayers.
>>> In my discussion with many of us, I regularly hear that the ACM is
>>> "not evil" (the SIGPLAN, of course, is pure good!) and that placating
>>> its weird views (for example, that it really does cost $700 or $900 to
>>> publish an article as Open Source) is good for our research
>>> community. It do not see how this argument is compatible with the ACM
>>> signing this letter.
>>>
>>> I believe that many of our activities, which we collectively trained
>>> ourselves to see as harmless administrative details of our research
>>> work, are in fact empowering the ACM to make those claims. Should we
>>> accept to give away our copyright, or payน unreasonable
>>> Gold Access author processing charges (APCs)?
>>>
>>> น: The SIGPLAN decision to cover APC costs for PACMPL articles is
>>> shielding many of us from paying APCs. But many of the smaller
>>> conferences, symposiums or workshops in our community whose
>>> proceedings are handled by the ACM are still limited to "pay
>>> $900" (or "pay $25 per page") as the only Open Access option, with
>>> copyright transfer as the only free choice, which is effectively
>>> keeping those proceedings Closed-Access.
>> -- 
>> Roberto Di Cosmo
>>
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