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

[Gabriel Scherer]

I also received off-list the confirmation that Springer OA prices for ETAPS
are not public, but that they are in the $100-$200 range. It's interesting
that Springer's *price* is in line with the ACM publication *costs* for
conference proceedings (without counting ACM DL costs).

On Sat, Jun 5, 2021 at 8:39 AM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear list,
>
> I was pointed off-list to the following interesting article from 2020, the
> first attempt by ACM to provide some sort of public financial information.
>
>   CACM: ACM Publications Finances
>
> https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/5/244322-acm-publications-finances/fulltext
>
> The report is interesting, and it suggests that the costs of publishing at
> ACM are quite high. Some details below. (Those are all 2019 numbers)
>
> - There is a staggering difference in per-article cost between "ACM
> journals" and "conference proceedings". According to this data, ACM Journal
> cost on average $1500 per article, while conference proceedings cost of
> $151 per article. In particular, the data reports that each ACM journal
> article spends $333 (on average) on "composition and copy-editing".
>   My uninformed guess would be that PACML, while being nominally a
> journal, is still handled by conference-proceedings processes: I have
> published in conference proceedings and then PACMPL, and not observed any
> change that would correspond to a ten-fold cost increase.
>
> - ACM reports a conference proceeding cost of $151 per article. In the
> blog post, they report it as $410, but in fact much of that figure
> corresponds to ACM revenue that they give to SIGs and include in the "cost
> of publication" of the SIG. (It's great that ACM makes revenue and that
> they fund the SIGs, but we are trying to understand publishing costs.)
>
> - None of the figure above include the ACM Digital Library (web hosting +
> long-term archiving), whose cost in 2019 were massive: $299 per conference
> proceeding publication on average. The post has more details on that: 2019
> was right after they launched the "new DL" platform, so a share of these
> costs are fixed and will not recur on following years. But they also expect
> to host more video content (indeed), so some other costs will increase.
>
>   Note that arxiv has costs of $14 per article, and Zenodo offers
> long-term archiving of gigabyte-large content for free as a public service
> ( https://help.zenodo.org/ ; this is supported as a "drop in the bucket"
> of CERN physicists costs archiving petabytes of experiment data. We use
> Zenodo to host the artifacts submitted to the Artifact Evaluation processes
> of several SIGPLAN conferences. )
>   ACM should let authors choose to publish on the ACM DL *or* on
> Arxiv+Zenodo; the people who see value in ACM DL could choose this option,
> and the others would vastly reduce hosting/archiving costs (from $299 to
> $14).
>
> - The revenue/costs numbers for ACM ICPS are interesting (International
> Conference Proceeding Series: as a non-ACM conference you can contract ACM
> to publish your proceedings, for a small per-paper price, in exchange for
> forcing your authors to give up their copyright to the ACM; several
> conferences of our community do this, for example PPDP). In 2019 they
> brought $362K of revenue in publication fees, for about $250K of publishing
> costs¹.
>   And the ICPS publishing fees are pretty reasonable! See the fee
> structure at https://www.acm.org/publications/icps-series : for one
> edition of proceedings, you pay $750 of fixed costs for up to 30 articles,
> plus $20 for each paper above the 30th.
>   If ACM makes a net profit with just those fees (the revenue figure is
> just for publication fees, it does not include subscriptions, pay-per-view
> etc.), this means that our ACM conferences could pay *exactly this price*
> for (Open Access) proceeding publications and not cost ACM any money, in
> fact bring revenue. (This only covers publishing costs, not ACM DL costs.)
>
> ¹:  ACM gives a figure of $215K ofr ICPS publishing costs, but it has not
> estimated overhead expense, so the figure is an under-estimate. We can
> estimate this cost. ICPS publishes on average 255 papers per year since
> 2002; optimistically assuming 1000 papers in 2019, if the overhead costs
> are proportional to the other conference proceeding overehead cost, this
> adds another $34K, for a total cost of $250K.
>
> On Sun, May 30, 2021 at 6:52 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>