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

Thu Jun 3 12:17:47 EDT 2021

Hi Gabriel, hi all,

You mentioned ETAPS in the message that started this thread, in
connection to financial transparency in publishing operations.

Let me comment on this as the publicity chair of ETAPS and an EB member.

We have been publishing with Springer since the beginning of ETAPS. 
From 2018, Springer has been publishing our proceedings in Gold OA.
This means that the proceedings volumes and the individual papers in
them are freely available for anyone to download from the moment of
publication, perpetually. This was not small achievement and the main
people that we should thank for this are Joost-Pieter Katoen and Holger
Hermanns. Of course we pay Springer for this OA arrangement. We've
discussed alternative publishers, but have so far remained with
Springer. Deliberations like this are not easy. There are a number of
factors to consider when choosing a publisher, and there are advantages
and disadvantages with any solution, believe me.

Just as conferences publishing with LIPIcs, we don't charge our
publication costs to the authors but absorb them into the conference
fees; the ETAPS Association has also covered part of the cost from
some reserves. (2021 was an exception since the conference was fully
online and, in order to budget soundly, we had to charge the authors
higher fees than other participants. Notice also that there is a general
expectation that an online-only conference must be free to attend or
cost very little, so we didn't have much choice here.)

How Springer has calculated the fees they charge us is of course not
under our control. Frankly, I think these are just numbers that both
they and our organization could agree to as a result of a negotiation.
But I can assure you that, as a conference organization, we strive for
low participation fees. Most certainly we do not add any mark-up to the
fees Springer already charges us for publishing the proceedings. 

Membership in the ETAPS Association is free and I invite everybody
interested in the work of the association to join! Our contracts
with Springer are available to view for any member in the members-only
section of the https://etaps.community/ website (but they are most
certainly not for redistribution). Also, all members are welcome to
attend the ETAPS Association general assembly, which is held each year
during the conference, and where we discuss various matters of policy. 

I am personally very strongly in favor of open access and fair handling
of the costs of publishing. 

Open access should certainly be much cheaper than it generally tends to
be. What major corporations (but also some professional associations)
have done to us as the research community until now has been simply
cruel. Public money for research has been diverted into outrageous
profit margins of the publishing industry as it shaped in the last
century and continues to date. 

This said, quality archival publishing can never be completely free.
Venues like EPTCS or LMCS appear to involve no or almost no cost only
because there is a lot of altruistic voluntary work put into them. As a
community, we should notice and acknowledge the hard work the good
people operating these outlets contribute from their "free" time. They
are heroes really! But one cannot build a publishing system on
enthusiasts alone. 

arXiv was mentioned in this thread. arXiv is a great repository, but it
is run by the Cornell University Library with support from the Simons
Foundations and members. The costs are not small (in 2021, in total
2.4 MUSD, out of which Cornell contributes 0.9 MUSD in cash and in
kind; check here: https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials). What if,
hypothetically, at one point the Cornell leadership finds that they've
got more some important project to support than arXiv? Things appearing
to cost nothing always cost something to someone. 

Tarmo U

On Tue, 01 Jun 2021 09:11:33 -0400
"Jon Sterling" <jon at jonmsterling.com> wrote:

> [ The Types Forum,
> http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
> 
> 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
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Computer Science Professor
> >            (on leave at Inria from IRIF/Université de Paris)
> > 
> > Director
> > Software Heritage             E-mail : roberto at dicosmo.org
> > INRIA                            Web : http://www.dicosmo.org
> > Bureau C328                  Twitter : http://twitter.com/rdicosmo
> > 2, Rue Simone Iff                Tel : +33 1 80 49 44 42
> > CS 42112
> > 75589 Paris Cedex 12
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > GPG fingerprint 2931 20CE 3A5A 5390 98EC 8BFC FCCA C3BE 39CB 12D3
> > 
> > 
> > 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
> > >  
> >   