[TYPES] Diamond open access, cost and sustainability model: a JOSS example

[Jon Sterling]

I think it is confusing to refer to costs that are already paid by someone else as "a bill that someone needs to foot". arXiv already exists, etc. ---- and anyone who wants to make a new totally free journal does not need to pay the costs of running the teams that make those amazing resources continue to exist. With due respect, most of the discourse I am hearing (including from the post on the SIGPLAN blog) makes it sound like someone who wants to start a journal needs to build their own arXiv.

It is true that as a community we need to think about how we can sustain the existence of resources like the arXiv. But doing so effectively almost certainly requires to work outside of ACM, IEEE, etc., if only because we need to fund (e.g.) preprint servers that are universal and not siloed by professional orgs that have shown again and again that they will spend millions of dollars on "value added" features that scientists are not asking for, in order to justify their large staffs. (e.g. How much did it cost Elsevier to develop and maintain the in-browser PDF viewer that we all immediately try to click away from?)

With respect, the article that Gabriel linked to in the beginning actually addresses many of the points that you seem to want to bring up. I think it would be good to either argue that the JOSS article is lying, or to accept that these "fixed costs" that somehow always manage to spiral into the millions are nothing but a scam.

Best,
Jon





On Mon, May 31, 2021, at 2:00 AM, Roberto Di Cosmo wrote:
> [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
> 
> Hi Gabriel,
>     stunning as it may seem, there are over 29.000 diamond open access
> journals around the world <https://operas.hypotheses.org/4579> (i.e. free
> [as in free beer] to publish and read). A majority of these are in the
> humanities, but there are quite a few in STEM too.
> 
> Unfortunately, there is no free lunch, and somebody needs to foot the 
> bill
> (there is a bill, see "What is a sustainable path to open access
> <https://blog.sigplan.org/2020/01/14/what-is-a-sustainable-path-to-open-access/>?"),
> which usually means a lot of volunteer work besides reviewing and 
> editing.
> 
> I suggest to have a look at this editorial piece of JOT (Journal of Object
> Technology) that has been around for some 20 years: it provides quite a bit
> of insight
> 
> Pierantonio, A., van den Brand, M., & Combemale, B. (2020). Open access all
> you wanted to know and never dared to ask. Journal of Object Technology,
> 19(1) <https://doi.org/10.5381/JOT.2020.19.1.E1>
> 
> Cheers
> 
> --
> Roberto
> 
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> 
> On Sun, 30 May 2021 at 18:57, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list
> > ]
> >
> > Dear list,
> >
> > Today I found out about JOSS, the Journal of Open Source Software (
> > https://joss.theoj.org/ ), an interesting journal in itself, which has a
> > stunning "Cost and sustainability model" webpage section:
> >   https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs
> >
> > For more stunning details, go read their more detailed blog post, "Cost
> > models for running an online open journal" : )
> >
> >
> > http://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-an-online-open-journal
> >
> > (Meanwhile in ACM land, we are still waiting for basic financial
> > transparency on paper publishing costs -- not that, say, ETAPS or JFP are
> > doing any better.
> > LIPIcs describes how they calculated their publishing costs at
> > https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publications/lipics/processing-charge/ , and
> > LMCS ( https://lmcs.episciences.org/ ) is now using a publicly-funded OA
> > publishing platform, so they may actually have no costs at all.)
> >
> > Cheers
> >
>