5 ms·

The financials of open access are interesting. Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) w

The financials of open access are interesting. Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1] Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free. 1. https://authors.acm.org/open-access https://authors.acm.org/open-access

cs_throwaway 9mo ago
Surprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)
woliveirajr 9mo ago
Didn't expect Brazil being off the "List of Countries Qualifying for APC Waivers" Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.
- coliveira 9mo ago
  These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.
- zipy124 9mo ago
  This is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also. Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil. [1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/ https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/
zipy124 9mo ago
The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen quantity over quality. Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.
- sheepscreek 9mo ago
  Processing != Publishing (at least I hope not).
- rovr138 9mo ago
  Is it a fee for publication or a fee for reviewing? Found, > Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
  - zipy124 9mo ago
    Upon publication almost exclusively.
  - specialp 9mo ago
    It is on acceptance almost universally. This is why more selective journals have higher APCs. The overhead of reviewing and processing more papers when less ultimately convert costs money.
- nairboon 9mo ago
  The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee. For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
humanfromearth9 9mo ago
How do independent researchers, doing research after hours, in the evening or the weekend, finance this?
- quentindanjou 9mo ago
  This is quite a good thing, as you will no longer have to buy all the research papers to advance your own research. The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you finance that or choose to publish in another journal.
- jna_sh 9mo ago
  Some journals support “green open access”, where you can share your article minus the journal’s formatting on open repositories etc, sometimes some time after publication, which is usually free. I can’t see any mention of this from the ACM though
  - pca006132 9mo ago
    But this is not related. You still have to pay the APC.
- zipy124 9mo ago
  Most reputable journals will waive the fees in this case, though the easier route if you are in a rich country where this is less likely is to partner with an institution. They get to add to their research output stats and you get your funding, a win win.
  - zipy124 9mo ago
    For those looking for examples, see the clickspring youtube channel on the "Antikythera mechanism", he is a skilled watchmaker and he works with academics on actual reseach whilst building a replica, despite having no acadeic affiliation himself (at least that I know of, feel free to correct me if I am wrong).
- 9mo ago
titzer 9mo ago
As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees. For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures. Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.
- schlauerfox 9mo ago
  This is on purpose, the industry was forged by someone explicitly trying to get rich off of a public resource. https://podcasts.apple.com/mz/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwell-how-ghislaine-maxwells-dad/id1373812661?i=1000706496292 https://podcasts.apple.com/mz/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
- mmooss 9mo ago
  Are you talking only about conference papers? What about those submitted to Nature, Science, etc.? And who will curate the best research, especially for people outside your field? I can't follow the discussion in every field.
  - aethor 9mo ago
    Researchers are curating for the editors, and are often not even paid for it. So the value that the editors bring is often low at best.
    - mmooss 9mo ago
      That implies that papers all have roughly the same value, which is certainly not true.
- 9mo ago
RuslanL 9mo ago
How is $1450 justified in modern times? Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?
- slow_typist 9mo ago
  It isn’t, but to get a full professorship, you need to publish in higher ranked journals. APC-Open-Access is just another iteration of the parasitic business model of the few big publishers. In the end, universities pay the same amounts to the publishers as before, or even more. This business model can only be overcome if and when academia changes the rules for assessment of application to higher ranked academic positions. There are journals that are entirely run by scientists and scientific libraries. Only in this model the peer review and publishing platform becomes a commodity.
- skirge 9mo ago
  value creation - it's not a hamburger but something serious!
- D-Machine 9mo ago
  Laundering prestige. Journals do almost nothing, and serious researchers (by which I mean, people who actually care about advancing knowledge, not careerist academics) haven't cared much about journal prestige for over a decade, at least.
- matwood 9mo ago
  You can look at the finances of the ACM here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131921358 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...
nickwrb 9mo ago
That’s not the only option, though. There is also institutional membership, which is basically the same as the previous subscription model, just pitched the other way around. Authors whose institutions are members don’t have to pay the processing charge. Here’s the list of current members: https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants
shellac 9mo ago
> Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).
cs_throwaway 9mo ago
The computer science that matters the most today —- machine learning, vision, NLP —- is open access without the fees because the main confs are not ACM. (Vision has some in IEEE.) I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.
ychnd 9mo ago
This is called "gold open access" and is a scam. It's just journals hijacking the open access initiative and raping it.
bluenose69 9mo ago
I've been in academia for more decades than I'd like to state, and I have never heard of an institute that covered article processing charges. I work in a natural science. Maybe things are different in computing fields, though.
a3_nm 9mo ago
I think this APC system is terrible -- it's enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged >$1000. Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/ https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.

cs_throwaway 9mo ago

Surprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)

woliveirajr 9mo ago

Didn't expect Brazil being off the "List of Countries Qualifying for APC Waivers" Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.

coliveira 9mo ago
These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.
zipy124 9mo ago
This is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also. Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil. [1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/ https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/

zipy124 9mo ago

The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen quantity over quality. Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.

sheepscreek 9mo ago
Processing != Publishing (at least I hope not).
rovr138 9mo ago
Is it a fee for publication or a fee for reviewing? Found, > Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
- zipy124 9mo ago
  Upon publication almost exclusively.
- specialp 9mo ago
  It is on acceptance almost universally. This is why more selective journals have higher APCs. The overhead of reviewing and processing more papers when less ultimately convert costs money.
nairboon 9mo ago
The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee. For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.

humanfromearth9 9mo ago

How do independent researchers, doing research after hours, in the evening or the weekend, finance this?

quentindanjou 9mo ago
This is quite a good thing, as you will no longer have to buy all the research papers to advance your own research. The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you finance that or choose to publish in another journal.
jna_sh 9mo ago
Some journals support “green open access”, where you can share your article minus the journal’s formatting on open repositories etc, sometimes some time after publication, which is usually free. I can’t see any mention of this from the ACM though
- pca006132 9mo ago
  But this is not related. You still have to pay the APC.
zipy124 9mo ago
Most reputable journals will waive the fees in this case, though the easier route if you are in a rich country where this is less likely is to partner with an institution. They get to add to their research output stats and you get your funding, a win win.
- zipy124 9mo ago
  For those looking for examples, see the clickspring youtube channel on the "Antikythera mechanism", he is a skilled watchmaker and he works with academics on actual reseach whilst building a replica, despite having no acadeic affiliation himself (at least that I know of, feel free to correct me if I am wrong).
9mo ago

titzer 9mo ago

As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees. For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures. Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.

schlauerfox 9mo ago
This is on purpose, the industry was forged by someone explicitly trying to get rich off of a public resource. https://podcasts.apple.com/mz/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwell-how-ghislaine-maxwells-dad/id1373812661?i=1000706496292 https://podcasts.apple.com/mz/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
mmooss 9mo ago
Are you talking only about conference papers? What about those submitted to Nature, Science, etc.? And who will curate the best research, especially for people outside your field? I can't follow the discussion in every field.
- aethor 9mo ago
  Researchers are curating for the editors, and are often not even paid for it. So the value that the editors bring is often low at best.
  - mmooss 9mo ago
    That implies that papers all have roughly the same value, which is certainly not true.
9mo ago

RuslanL 9mo ago

How is $1450 justified in modern times? Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?

slow_typist 9mo ago
It isn’t, but to get a full professorship, you need to publish in higher ranked journals. APC-Open-Access is just another iteration of the parasitic business model of the few big publishers. In the end, universities pay the same amounts to the publishers as before, or even more. This business model can only be overcome if and when academia changes the rules for assessment of application to higher ranked academic positions. There are journals that are entirely run by scientists and scientific libraries. Only in this model the peer review and publishing platform becomes a commodity.
skirge 9mo ago
value creation - it's not a hamburger but something serious!
D-Machine 9mo ago
Laundering prestige. Journals do almost nothing, and serious researchers (by which I mean, people who actually care about advancing knowledge, not careerist academics) haven't cared much about journal prestige for over a decade, at least.
matwood 9mo ago
You can look at the finances of the ACM here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131921358 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...

nickwrb 9mo ago

That’s not the only option, though. There is also institutional membership, which is basically the same as the previous subscription model, just pitched the other way around. Authors whose institutions are members don’t have to pay the processing charge. Here’s the list of current members: https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants

shellac 9mo ago

> Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).

cs_throwaway 9mo ago

The computer science that matters the most today —- machine learning, vision, NLP —- is open access without the fees because the main confs are not ACM. (Vision has some in IEEE.) I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.

ychnd 9mo ago

This is called "gold open access" and is a scam. It's just journals hijacking the open access initiative and raping it.

bluenose69 9mo ago

I've been in academia for more decades than I'd like to state, and I have never heard of an institute that covered article processing charges. I work in a natural science. Maybe things are different in computing fields, though.

a3_nm 9mo ago

I think this APC system is terrible -- it's enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged >$1000. Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/ https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.