{"id":2193,"date":"2009-11-02T07:03:12","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T14:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=2193"},"modified":"2009-11-02T00:26:28","modified_gmt":"2009-11-02T08:26:28","slug":"academic-papers-want-to-be-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=2193","title":{"rendered":"Academic papers want to be free"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There is an interesting discussion on Panos Ipeirotis&#8217;s blog about <a title=\"What is the (Real) Cost of Open Access? | A Computer Scientist in a Business School\" href=\"http:\/\/behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com\/2009\/10\/what-is-real-cost-of-open-access.html\" target=\"_blank\">open-access publishing<\/a>, and the ACM. He argues that the ACM should grant open access to its <a title=\"ACM Digital Library\" href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/dl\" target=\"_blank\">digital library<\/a> because ACM&#8217;s stated goal is <span>&#8220;Advancing Computing as a Science and a Profession<\/span>,&#8221; and that this would be an effective way to do so. I&#8217;ve always thought that the ACM digital library fees were unnecessary. Like Panos, I don&#8217;t know what ACM&#8217;s expenses are, but I do know that conferences are profit centers, and that too many non-profitable years can lead to trouble for the sponsoring SIGs. Given that<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>conferences make money from attendees,<\/li>\n<li>all typesetting costs are borne by authors these days,<\/li>\n<li>conferences are starting to abandon print proceedings (or to charge extra for them)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>what is the rationale for charging for subsequent access to these papers? <!--more-->I could see having a one-to-two month blackout period during which proceedings are accessible only to ACM members, but after that, free access should be granted to all. After all, ACM already grants authors the right to distribute their papers from the authors&#8217; sites (as long as it is not for profit), and ACM serves the metadata to published papers for free. So with respect to conference papers, all people get for their membership is that they don&#8217;t have to run a web search for the title of the paper to find the PDF version. Hardly a monopoly worth protecting.<\/p>\n<p>Journal articles, of course, are somewhat different because their costs are not offset directly by conferences. Yet many of these costs are a legacy of print publishing; dispensing with that can drive down the costs significantly. A <a href=\"http:\/\/behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com\/2009\/10\/what-is-real-cost-of-open-access.html?showComment=1256578178333#c8032528228642596966\" target=\"_blank\">comment<\/a> on Panos&#8217;s blog post suggests that the publisher provides expensive services as part of the publication process, including typesetting, marketing, and hosting of digital content. But typesetting costs can be passed onto the authors just as they are with conferences, the ACM brand is sufficiently strong these days that no additional marketing short of including publications in the DL should be necessary, and the cost of serving content can be amortized over the cost of serving all the conference papers.<\/p>\n<p>Traditional print journals have employed copy editors to produce &#8220;pretty&#8221; pages from authors&#8217; manuscripts. But that was in the days when these same editors used less sophisticated tools than the modern word precessing system available to authors. High quality conferences publish papers produced by their authors, with only cursory checks on the formatting of the document. What checks are performed manually can either be handled automatically (Contest: write a program that checks submitted PDF or LaTex for conformance with ACM style sheet), or manually by crowd-sourcing this to reviewers, just as they already crowd-source the review of content. And since the conference format is already well understood by authors, simply relaxing the page limit should be sufficient. After all, readers care more about what the articles say than about gutters and margins and fancy footnote separators.<\/p>\n<p>It is not clear to me what costs ACM needs to bear to market itself at conferences. Most people in the field are well familiar with the brand, and with its publications, and the fact that many important conferences in the field are sponsored by ACM SIGs, and their proceedings disseminated through the ACM DL should be enough of a brand. Why spend more money on this?<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the software and hardware related costs of hosting journal articles can be borne by the system for publishing conference papers. Even if the number of journal articles is comparable to the number of conference papers, notes, and other publication types, the additional costs of disk space to serve them are negligible. As of this writing, a terabyte of storage costs $150\/month or less on <a title=\"Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Amazon.com\" href=\"http:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/s3\/#pricing\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon<\/a>. While this does not include bandwidth costs for serving the data, this is still reasonably cheap, no matter how bloated the PDF files get! ACM should also be able to negotiate a reasonable deal with a dedicated service provider that beats the Amazon rates. Of course it could save itself even more money by relying an a service such as arXiv.org to host the content, and only manage the metadata on its own servers. Another interesting possibility is to have the <a title=\"NSF-funded digital library? | FXPAL Blog\" href=\"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=1991\" target=\"_blank\">NSF pay<\/a> for the cost of hosting content in exchange for providing open access.<\/p>\n<p>In short, it seems that ACM&#8217;s policies of charging for content stem from seeing itself as a traditional publisher rather than as a society predicated on the technological innovation. It&#8217;s time to change this!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is an interesting discussion on Panos Ipeirotis&#8217;s blog about open-access publishing, and the ACM. He argues that the ACM should grant open access to its digital library because ACM&#8217;s stated goal is &#8220;Advancing Computing as a Science and a Profession,&#8221; and that this would be an effective way to do so. I&#8217;ve always thought [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2193"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2199,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}