Occupy ACM: We are the 99% « Windows On Theory

A typical computer science paper might represent the work of 2-4 authors over a year. Even though these authors don’t spend 100% of that year working on the paper, just counting their salaries, benefits, etc.. we see that the total cost to produce a paper can still easily amount to several tens of thousands of dollars or more. This cost is typically borne by a combination of their employers (often non-profit or public universities) and funding agencies such as the NSF. When the paper is submitted to a conference, referees and the program committees typically spend some additional few hours reading it, debating its merits, writing reviews etc.. They are not paid for the effort, and so this additional cost, amounting to several hundreds of dollars, is also typically borne by their employers. Finally, the paper is published, which in these electronic-proceedings days amounts to placing it on the web (perhaps after asking the author to covert it into an ugly two-column format) . This costs about $10 per paper on the arXiv, or about $400 for the ACM (see here). Thus the publication cost is roughly somewhere between 0.1% to 1% of the total cost to produce the paper. There has been much debate about who should spend this 1% of costs, and whether spending it entitles organizations such as Elsevier or ACM to collect royalties from readers of the paper.  In this debate, ACM’s positions are mostly not supportive of open access (e.g., see here  and here). Indeed in some sense ACM’s policies are more restrictive than Elsevier’s, who allows free access to mathematics papers after 4 years from publication. ACM also opposed the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)..."