I don’t see what the benefit of most of that is, and why publication fees are a good way to pay for it. Take video recordings: why should we pay for them to develop a video hosting platform when perfectly good ones exist? In fact, conferences that I am familiar with put the recordings on YouTube, and this works great.
> ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.
The attitude that the work of science belongs to these publishers is what grates me the most. Yes, ACM is not as bad as Elsevier, but this attitude is still fundamentally wrong. They are in the position they are mostly by historical accident, able to extract rents because it requires a lot of coordination to switch.
Why do I call it rent extraction despite the ACM doing stuff? Suppose the ACM charged separately for using their video platform. Would anyone pay for that?
> For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara
And what good is that? Why should we pay for a separate company to run pdflatex for us? The system exists primarily to check that we’ve put ACM branding in the paper.
Sometimes people also say that the real service is long term storage of pdfs, but let me preempt that right now: there are government sponsored long term storage facilities like Zenodo that are likely to outlast ACM. Second, commercial storage paid for indefinitely using an annuity would cost less than $1 in present value for hosting the pdfs of a conference, about 0.0001% of ACM publication fees.
> ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.
The attitude that the work of science belongs to these publishers is what grates me the most. Yes, ACM is not as bad as Elsevier, but this attitude is still fundamentally wrong. They are in the position they are mostly by historical accident, able to extract rents because it requires a lot of coordination to switch.
Why do I call it rent extraction despite the ACM doing stuff? Suppose the ACM charged separately for using their video platform. Would anyone pay for that?
> For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara
And what good is that? Why should we pay for a separate company to run pdflatex for us? The system exists primarily to check that we’ve put ACM branding in the paper.
Sometimes people also say that the real service is long term storage of pdfs, but let me preempt that right now: there are government sponsored long term storage facilities like Zenodo that are likely to outlast ACM. Second, commercial storage paid for indefinitely using an annuity would cost less than $1 in present value for hosting the pdfs of a conference, about 0.0001% of ACM publication fees.