Comments
By trainyperson 2025-12-1815:5912 reply 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.
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.
By rorytbyrne 2025-12-1820:4010 reply I disagree. We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I think these new incentives are exactly what we want:
1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.
2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.
3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
By Al-Khwarizmi 2025-12-198:016 reply > We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.
In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.
If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).
I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.
I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.
For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.
I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.
By Al-Khwarizmi 2025-12-1911:36 > I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.
Yes, in fact this is mainly what I meant with "quality badge". It's a badge mostly for instutitional bean-counting processes. Fellow scientists don't need it that much, typically we can separate the wheat from the chaff with a very quick skim.
By hnben 2025-12-1910:57 > which is a problem for professionals
dont worry, leadership will find another metric to turn into a target, after the old metric has stopped working for a decade or two.
By ocschwar 2025-12-222:54 Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).
Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.
By dr_dshiv 2025-12-198:24 In my field, journals subsist precisely as targets for a PhD. 3 journal publications and you can become a doc.
By rorytbyrne 2025-12-1911:39 Yes exactly. Right now they are arbiters of quality but they shouldn't be, and the move towards Open Access is changing their role.
By Al-Khwarizmi 2025-12-1911:28 Semantic Scholar is for search, but you can't just go there and look at everything that has been uploaded today as you do in arXiv, right? I know many people who check arXiv every day (myself included) but not Semantic Scholar, although I guess this might be highly field-specific.
What follows is totally offtopic, but to be honest I don't check Semantic Scholar much because I have a grudge with it. Profiles just don't work for authors with accented characters in the name (such as myself), papers get dispersed between multiple automatically-generated profiles. The staff is very helpful and will manually merge profiles for me when asked, but then I publish a new paper and wham, instead of incorporating it into the merged profile the system creates a new one. This has been going on for 6 years (if not more) and still unfixed.
For all the criticism that Google Scholar gets, I highly prefer it because it gets that right. It's extremely annoying when tools give you extra work for committing the sin of not having an Anglo-Saxon name (this is much more common than unaffected people would expect) and just don't seem to care to fix it.
By RossBencina 2025-12-1821:443 reply > journals should not be the arbiters of quality
It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.
By rorytbyrne 2025-12-1822:02 Indeed, they are irrelevant. Right now they maintain an administrative monopoly over the peer review process, that makes them de-facto arbiters even if it's peers doing the work.
Journals should either become tech companies offering (and charging for) new and exciting ways to present scientific research, or simply stop existing.
By SoleilAbsolu 2025-12-190:44 I agree, and...
Completely off topic, but thanks for creating AudioMulch, I don't use it actively anymore but it totally revolutionized how I approach working with sound!
By beezle 2025-12-192:28 At the end of the day, I expect a journal that I pay for to be better than arXiv and that means quality control. Few people have the time to self-vet everything they read to the extent that it should be in absence of other eyes
By pessimizer 2025-12-1916:31 > we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.
That's literally all I want them to do. I would love if they dwindled away to simply being monthly blog entries with magnet links to the articles, maybe with an introductory editorial.
We refuse to do this, because we have deeply integrated journals into a system of compensation for everyone involved. They're just magazines; "journal" is the beginning of the pomposity.
You could already publish a "fusion" journal where you link to the best articles in your field, and publish reviews of them - or even go back and forth with authors who want to be listed in your journal for a paper that they're about to publish. Outside of salaries, it would cost as much as a wordpress/patreon blog, or really, just a monthly twitter thread. The reason this doesn't happen is because it doesn't integrate with the academic financial system.
The only thing worthwhile about the journals is their brands, and the major ones in a lot of their fields (especially medicine) have ground their brands into dust through low quality. They continue through inertia: once anyone has ever made money doing something in the West, it will be preserved by any means necessary, because it's worth giving up part of that cash in order not to lose all of it. Scams are only ever defeated by bigger scams.
Nobody who is only important because they published in The Lancet will ever tolerate the devaluing of the idea of publishing in The Lancet, unless you give him a stipend for being involved in the next thing. Consequently, you're not going to be able to get a job from being published in Bob's Blog, no matter the quality of the peer review. Hence $1500 open access fees.
By patmorgan23 2025-12-194:572 reply If publishing the most papers is the goal why do we even need journals? We have blogs and preprint servers if Volume is your goal.
Journals should absolutely play a role in maintaining quality and curating what they publish.
By DistractionRect 2025-12-195:532 reply > If publishing the most papers is the goal why do we even need journals?
For discoverability. Someone's trivial finding may be someone else's key to a major breakthrough, but little good it does if it can't be easily found
By Al-Khwarizmi 2025-12-197:561 reply In my field, arXiv (free preprint server) is actually much more discoverable than journals. It tends to be on top of Google searchers, many people (myself include) check it out daily, and few people even check journals (why would you check dozens of different ones if everyone posts their work on arXiv?).
By teleforce 2025-12-1911:08 > everyone posts their work on arXiv
Not everyone.
Do you know that you can get rejected by arXiv if they think your publication is not worthy of their publication.
It's an open access journal masquerading as pre-print server. There are other much more open pre-print server.
This isn’t being realistic. The major benefit of these is peer review. You aren’t going to have enough people to peer review the work of a massively open and public publication system.
On top of that the chance of finding something as you suggest becomes that much more difficult. Smaller findings get published now in a more controlled scenario and get lost in the stream.
Major journals are a net positive for surfacing important science.
By notarobot123 2025-12-197:20 Yet "peer review" would absolutely scale if it were actually the review of peers (and not just an editorial board). A large number of publications where submissions are reviewed by previous and prospective authors would be much like how open source peer review works, though not without its own set of issues.
Discovery is a search problem and its pretty clear that we have the technical capacity to solve that problem if there is enough of a signal from wide-spread peer review.
Major journals become those that re-publish and report on the big debates and discoveries of the actually peer-reviewed journals and this would be the work of "journalists".
By _jsmh 2025-12-1910:11 Peer-review can also occur from non-gatekeepers, from non-experts. You realize you posted this on a massively open and public publication system, right?
Non-experts sometimes bring perspectives that gatekeepers are blind to.
By epigramx 2025-12-195:45 Peer review success is not the rule of the owner of a company but the acceptance you get from peers.
By j_maffe 2025-12-1820:50 I can tell you for a fact that points 2 and 3 usually do not hold simply because publishing fees are directly correlated with the "prestige" perception of the journal.
These are all valid points. I think we agree we are just looking at different things, I argued if journals maintained their arbiter quality then the system is bad, but you rightly point out that this could finally grip this quality out of their hands, and so it could be good for science overall actually. I think these are fair points :)
By rorytbyrne 2025-12-1911:45 Haha yes I jumped off in a very different direction. The points you raised are very much valid in the short-term. But longer term, I think journals charging authors for some kind of enhanced research presentation service is actually quite valuable, so the short-term negative effects might lead to a good outcome for the industry down the line - we hope.
By newswasboring 2025-12-198:231 reply > we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.
At that point why even have a journal, let's just put everything as a Reddit post and be done with it. We will get comment abilities for free.
Maintaining quality standards is a good service, the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.
By rorytbyrne 2025-12-1911:49 > At that point why even have a journal
Great question.
> the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.
I wish I could agree but Nature et al continually publish bad, attention-grabbing science, while holding back the good science because it threatens the research programmes that gave the editorial board successful careers.
"Isn't perfect" is a massive understatement.
So what service to the journals provide to the people who are paying them?
By rorytbyrne 2025-12-1911:51 You pay them, they give your work a stamp of prestige that is mostly unrelated to the quality of your work.
I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.
They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?
Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.
By heisenbit 2025-12-1912:16 Maybe we should pay the ones that put in the work and leverage their experience to judge the quality which would be the reviewers. In this age of disintermediation journals add little value in providing infrastructure or paying (if at all) reviewers and that money is in any case mostly public money.
By rorytbyrne 2025-12-1912:051 reply > Who else do you suggest and why are they better?
The arbiters are just our colleagues, at the end of the day. The journal is just the organisational mechanism, one of many possible mechanisms.
For example, I follow a weekly reading list (https://superlab.ca) published by a group of motor control labs at Western University. Those people are my arbiters of quality.
I want to continue having arbiters, and I want it to be the same people (broadly speaking). I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.
By mmooss 2025-12-1918:01 That sounds fine, though I'd add the consideration that the further someone is from your field, the more that an arbiter and a highly filtered reading list become necessities. A scholar in another field isn't part of the daily conversation in yours and doesn't have time to get involved or read up on on it - and, without arbiters, they'd need to do in every field except their own. And the scientifically literate public has no hope - will they find the Western University list? For every field they're interested in? And read every list in every field?
A few central arbiters of the best research - e.g. Nature and Science - make science accessible outside your field, and outside professional science. Even reading those two publications is too much every week, with all the other reading, other activities, family, responsibilties, etc. on top of career.
> I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.
I don't care if it's journals, though people often assume that shifting power away from the current flawed institution to a new one will resolve the problems. The probems are inherent to power itself. We need a different structure with different incentives if we want a different outcome.
By _jsmh 2025-12-1910:29 A different way to not require journals to be the arbiters of quality is to let the truth itself be the arbiter of quality instead of designate gatekeepers.
1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty specifically.
2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.
> Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers.
That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.
> If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers
On the other hand predatory journals make a killing from APCs so there is some market for journals with no readers.
By samarthr1 2025-12-196:21 My university had made it mandatory for students to publish atleast 1 paper to graduate from their bachelors degree, and would pay all the associated fees.
Most kids unfortunately did end up paying to publish.
By KeplerBoy 2025-12-199:46 Authors don't pay for that personally though. Nobody bats an eye at the $1500 publishing fee for a mediocre paper, that could have been a blog post, because the institution is happy to bolster its publication count.
Heck, nobody even bats an eye if that publication is to be presented at a conference with a few thousand bucks in travel costs.
By youainti 2025-12-1821:58 This would probably depend heavily on how tenure decisions handles publishing. If it is heavily biased towards quantity of publishing, then that won't matter as much as you can "pay to win your paycheck".
If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should work better.
The whole publication model is broken, not just the incentives. It used to be researchers eager to share their new findings with the few hundred people that could understand them, now it's throngs of PhD students grinding their way to degrees and postdocs trying to secure tenure. The journals are flooded with nonsense and actual researchers resort to word of mouth point out valuable papers to each other.
By D-Machine 2025-12-194:18 This is accurate and known to anyone actually in the area.
By strangattractor 2025-12-1817:112 reply The people that pay are the Institutions (Universities mainly). Not the readers. The publications are sold to them as bundles even if the Institution does not want all the journals.
Yes you are correct, however I don't understand how this relates to my point, do you mind clarifying? I'd also caveat that the library (the purchaser of these bundles at most universities) often buys bundles based on requests from academics (more specifically research groups/departments) at the university, thus the readers do have some sway over which are purchased.
By strangattractor 2025-12-1819:481 reply I do not know specifics of bundling agreements (shocker that I admit not knowing something:). I do know that libraries at some Institutions have started to provide funds to their researchers to pay the APCs. The library then goes to the Open Access publisher and negotiates bulk APC deals if they commit to a certain number of publications. Sort of a win win grant wise. This does not necessarily guaranty publication but if it does not get published you don't pay (processing submissions is an expense Open Access publishers incurs).
I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts access to information.
I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and research money.
I would also argue that there are other problems within research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you for the honest discussion.
By zipy124 2025-12-1821:39 Thanks for clarifying, I agree with you for sure.
By _jsmh 2025-12-1912:15 Many if not most of the readers are grad students. Arguably they're the people who pay that indirectly in increased tuition fees.
By beambot 2025-12-192:13 > Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers
Publishers have a finite capacity based on the number of credible peer reviewers. In the past, it felt very exploitative as an academic doing peer review for the economic benefit of publishing houses. I'd much rather have "public good" publishers with open access -- at least I feel like the "free" labor is aligned with the desired outcome.
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).
By __MatrixMan__ 2025-12-1820:162 reply It still wouldn't be perfect, but I'd like to see a system that rewarded publishers and authors for coming up with work that was a load bearing citation for other work (by different authors on different publishers, i.e. ones with no ulterior motive for having chosen it as a source).
Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.
By swiftcoder 2025-12-1820:271 reply You know, we briefly had this with the h-index, and now h-index manipulation is so rife that it is no longer highly correlated with successful academic careers
By __MatrixMan__ 2025-12-1821:54 I see, I hadn't seen the h-index before. I guess that's Goodhart's law for you.
There's got to be ways to improve things though.
I built something like this but it didn't get users. Replying to an author for the valuable info they posted would pay the author and it also accepted public payments.
An AI or search engine that identified the value of a contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.
By __MatrixMan__ 2025-12-1916:29 I can imagine that adoption was hard to achieve gradually. I figure you'd need a bunch of universities to get together and all at once say to the publishers:
> The only way we'll pay you ever again is through {the protocol}, deal with it.
If people just sought out and participated in better incentive alignment under the expectation that things would be better if only everybody did so... Well then things would already be better and we wouldn't be dreaming these dreams in the first place.
By zwnow 2025-12-197:56 You had the quantity argument as well when it was about accumulation of subscribers. As a bigger variety of content also attracts a bigger variety of people.
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.
By hbplawinski 2025-12-1821:141 reply I doubt that this is true except maybe for the top journals. Mid and low tier journals cater to scientists whose main incentive is to publish no matter how while moderately optimizing for impact factor (i.e. readers and citations). This lower quality market is huge. The fact that even top tier publishers have created low-ranking journals that address this market segment using APC-based open-access models shows the alignment between publisher and author interests will not necessarily lead to increasing quality, rather the opposite.
By nairboon 2025-12-1913:42 Does anyone actually read articles from those low tier journals? Many of those articles are illegible fluff pieces.
That top tier publishers create new low-tier journals for this market shows that they are very well aware of these incentives and risks. They are not flooding their top journals with low quality OA "pay to publish" articles, which was the argument from OP.
By zipy124 2025-12-1817:38 For academia's sake I hope you are correct, but my experience of the system leads me to suspect otherwise, though only time will tell.
One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
Disagree. The journals are now acting like a paid certification. If they admit any old slop, who would pay to submit their papers?
The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions.
Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?
By TomasBM 2025-12-1821:51 Small correction to your point: they perhaps provide a reason for peer review to happen, but it's scientists themselves who coordinate and provide the actual peer review.
That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.
By _jsmh 2025-12-1910:45 Reputable quality bar isn't the right metric. Quality is a better metric. To the extent it can be estimated, impact is another. Neither of these require journals specifically.
A different way to look at this is to question what "old slop" actually means.
The reason not to publish in Nature is that it might take a long time to get everything right in the paper to publish, to the point it takes years to get it read. Publishing fewer results faster spreads the results faster.
By sheepscreek 2025-12-1913:03 Processing != Publishing (at least I hope not).
By aimanbenbaha 2025-12-1822:001 reply What about a better deal: Scientific knowledge shouldn't be a for-profit venture to pursue.
By NetMageSCW 2025-12-1914:59 Do you work for free?
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.
By schlauerfox 2025-12-1816:30 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-maxwel...
By D-Machine 2025-12-193:25 Agreed. Also the claims that the fees are for typesetting and the like are highly suspect, given how specific so many journals' formatting requirements are. As poster above says, if they were spending any significant amount of money on typesetting and the like, you wouldn't have strange nags about margins and capitalization and other formatting nonsense, so it is clear they basically do almost nothing on this front.
If they did any serious typesetting, they'd be fine with a simple Markdown or e.g. RMarkdown file, BibTeX and/or other standard format bibliography file, and figures meeting certain specifications, but instead, you often get demands for Word files that meet specific text size and margin requirements, or to use LaTeX templates. There are exceptions to this, of course.
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.
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?
By matwood 2025-12-198:23 You can look at the finances of the ACM here:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...
By slow_typist 2025-12-196:41 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.
By D-Machine 2025-12-197:23 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.
By skirge 2025-12-196:48 value creation - it's not a hamburger but something serious!
By cs_throwaway 2025-12-1816:05 Surprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)
By woliveirajr 2025-12-1816:052 reply 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.
By zipy124 2025-12-1817:49 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.
By coliveira 2025-12-1817:29 These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.
By a3_nm 2025-12-208:51 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/ or 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.
By nickwrb 2025-12-197:19 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
By ychnd 2025-12-1918:09 This is called "gold open access" and is a scam. It's just journals hijacking the open access initiative and raping it.
By shellac 2025-12-199:02 > 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).
By humanfromearth9 2025-12-1816:116 reply How do independent researchers, doing research after hours, in the evening or the weekend, finance this?
By quentindanjou 2025-12-1816:16 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.
By psychoslave 2025-12-1818:43 I don't, I publish directly on Wikiversity. There it's available to read, use and edit by every follow human with an internet connection. Those willing to contribute with feedback can do so through discussion pages.
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.
By zipy124 2025-12-1821:45 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).
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
By pca006132 2025-12-1817:48 But this is not related. You still have to pay the APC.
By pks016 2025-12-1819:51 You don't :( You look for alternatives. You get discriminated based on wealth
By segmondy 2025-12-1821:21 your website
By bluenose69 2025-12-1920:19 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.
By cs_throwaway 2025-12-1913:43 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.
By andrenarchy 2025-12-1819:553 reply CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
By denotational 2025-12-1821:313 reply > Good publishing costs money
Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?
By andrenarchy 2025-12-1823:002 reply Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary.
Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience.
> long-term preservation
How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files.
> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation
I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
By capnrefsmmat 2025-12-190:002 reply Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements, many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central, which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a structured XML version of papers.
Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
By adgjlsfhk1 2025-12-192:121 reply I bet if you offer to waive a $1500 fee for authors who submit a latex version, a lot of grad students will learn it pretty fast.
By DonaldPShimoda 2025-12-208:10 At least in my experience, grad students don't pay submission fees. It usually comes out of an institutional finances account, typically assigned to the student's advisor (who is generally the corresponding author on the submission). (Not that the waiver isn't a good idea — I just don't think the grad students are the ones who would feel relieved by that arrangement.)
Also, I'm pretty sure my SIG requires LaTeX submissions anyway... I feel like I remember reading that at some point when I submitted once, but I'm not confident in that recollection.
> Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited.
Since this is obviously true, and yet since most journals (with some exceptions) demand you follow tedious formatting requirements or highly restrictive templates, this suggests, in fact, that journals are outsourcing the vast majority of their typesetting and formatting to submitters, and doing only the bare minimum themselves.
By capnrefsmmat 2025-12-1913:451 reply Most of the tedious formatting requirements do not match what the final typeset article looks like. The requirements are instead theoretically to benefit peer reviewers, e.g., by having double-spaced lines so they can write their comments on the paper copy that was mailed to them back when the submission guidelines were written in the 1950s.
The smarter journals have started accepting submissions in any format on the first round, and then only require enough formatting for the typesetters to do their job.
By DonaldPShimoda 2025-12-208:12 ...really? (Incredulous, not doubtful.)
For my area, everybody uses LaTeX styles that more or less produce PDFs identical to the final versions published in proceedings. Or, at least, it's always looked close enough to me that I haven't noticed any significant differences, other than some additional information in the margins.
This is difficult in practice. For LaTeX, in theory the publisher would simply provide their style sheet (.cls) and maybe some style guidelines, and all the authors have to do is to adhere to that file and typesetting is done.
The reason this doesn't work in practice is that authors don't always play nicely, not because of bad intentions, but because they don't want to cooperate but because of the realities of life: they don't have the time to study style guidelines in detail, they use their own auxiliary LaTeX macro collection because that's what they're used to, or simply because of oversights. Also, typesetting often includes a whole lot of meticulous things, if you listed them all in a guide sheet, that would be a long list of stuff at a level that's too detailed for authors.
I'm not saying it's impossible for authors to fully follow a publisher's style guide but there's a reason publishers employ full time workers who do nothing else but correct submitted manuscripts. Like many other professions, it's a trained skill.
By D-Machine 2025-12-198:48 Nonsense. Formatting demands make things worse here, you could just ask authors to submit unformatted content (e.g. Markdown or RMarkdown, or utterly minimal LaTeX file, with references and a bibliography file) and then trivially move that content into whatever format is required. There are in fact journals that do this too (i.e. don't have formatting requirements).
As a submitter applying to multiple journals with arbitrary formatting requirements, you are often forced to meet arbitrary and irrelevant (visual) style requirements even before you are likely to be published, so of course you keep a base unformatted copy that you modify as needed to satisfy whatever bullshit policies each random journal demands. This wastes everyone's time.
The reason submitters don't "play nicely" is because the publishers' demands ("style guides") are demented here: they should just be asking for unformatted content (besides figures), certainly for submissions, and even for accepted publications: they should actually be doing the work of formatting and typesetting. But instead they force most of this on the submitters, to save costs by extorting the desperation of academics.
> Typesetting is a big item
I'm calling bullshit. Look at how annoying the template requirements are for authors: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions, and note the stuff around Word files. Other journals can be much worse.
If any serious typesetting were being done by these journals, simple plaintext, Markdown (or RMarkdown) or minimal basic LaTeX, with, admittedly, figures generated to spec, would be more than enough for typesetters to manage. In fact, if you were doing serious typesetting, you wouldn't want your users doing a bunch of formatting and layout themselves, and would demand more minimal representations of the content only. Instead you have these ridiculous templates. I am not convinced AT ALL.
Do authors submitting to literary agents have to follow such absurd rules? I think not. Can modern blogging tools create beautiful sites with simple Markdown and images? Yes. So why do academic publishers demand so much from authors? IMO because they are barely doing anything at all re: typesetting and formatting and the like.
To understand the academic publishing process better, it's a good idea to look at the four main groups of people involved in the process: authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers.
The authors write up their research results.
The editors organize the review process together with the reviewers and the publishing process together with the publisher.
The reviewers read the papers and write their reviews.
The publishers publish the papers.
Stylesheets are typically provided by the publishers and passed on to the authors early on. The reason is two-fold: for one, the publisher wants to produce a high-quality product and uniformity of layouts and styles is an important factor. But the second reason has to do with everything that happens before the publishers even comes into play: common style-sheets also provide some level of fairness because they make the papers by different authors comparable to some degree, e.g., via the max length of a paper.
On top of that, authors often want to present their research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors already have an interest in using something more powerful than Markdown.
But like I wrote in another comment here, in doing so, authors do not always adhere to the style guides provided by the publisher - not necessarily maliciously, but the result is the same. For instance, authors might simply be used to handling whitespace a certain way - because that's how they always do it. But if that clashes with the publisher's guidelines, it's one of the things the publisher has to correct in typesetting.
So, perhaps that's the confusion here also to some degree: the typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of the cases on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply enforcing the rules that were missed by the authors (with the goal of fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
> the typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of the cases on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply enforcing the rules that were missed by the authors (with the goal of fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
As I said, if this is the case, the vast majority of typesetting and formatting has clearly been outsourced to submitters, and this means the amount of actual typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal compared to in other domains.
EDIT:
> On top of that, authors often want to present their research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors already have an interest in using something more powerful than Markdown.
Yes, generally, I don't want to present my formulas and figures in the shitty and limited ways the journal demands, but which would be trivial to present on a website (which is the only way 99.9% of people access articles now anyway). So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated.
> and this means the amount of actual typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal compared to in other domains
This doesn't follow logically, and even though I don't know how it is in other domains, I know for a fact that the amount of typesetting done for a typical CS journal is non-trivial.
> So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated.
I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I don't expect to be able to change them.
> I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I don't expect to be able to change them.
Much like the journals that have figure requirements for print, even though the amount of people that have viewed a figure in print in the last 20 years is an order of magnitude less than a rounding error.
Typesetting costs in 2025 are trivial, if you swallow this claim from academic publishers, you are being had:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009
https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-autom...
https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/
By kleiba 2025-12-1911:33 There are smaller publishers whose fees are a lot lower than ACM's.
By gucci-on-fleek 2025-12-191:361 reply I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example.
By adgjlsfhk1 2025-12-192:101 reply Surely you charge printing and mailing to the people you are mailing to though.
By gucci-on-fleek 2025-12-196:06 Yes, we charge $35 a year (for 3 issues) for printing and mailing, which is just a little bit more than what it costs us.
By bubblethink 2025-12-191:32 This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs, Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That's what they'll say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the market bears.
You say there are costs, but you don't say what the costs actually are.
It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial.
Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.)
In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work.
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That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this.
I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.
You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some non-trivial typesetting costs.
But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting.
Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a triviality:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009
https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-autom...
https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/
https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_...
By KingMob 2025-12-1911:22 Well, I don't think it's "very obvious", nor do I think "it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting". I guess I'm not seeing the evidence the same way.
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I read your links, and I think the most interesting relevant one with good numbers is the svpow.com link.
The StackExchange one says "34%" of their cost is "editorial and production". That includes more than type-setting, so it's not clear what subfraction is pure type-setting, and whether it's overpriced or not.
The Lode one is selling Latex templates, and they even say "Users without LaTeX experience should budget for learning time or technical assistance." It's more of a low-cost self-serve alternative, which probably doesn't include everything a journal does to maintain visual consistency. We can argue that full-service is overpriced, sure, but this is different, like complaining about coffee shops because the vending machine is cheaper.
The Reddit link is about a book author with a pure text novel, possibly the optimal scenario for cheap type-setting.
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The svpow.com link was interesting, but, it seems like type-setting costs are usually bundled in (possibly to obscure overcharging, sure), so maybe it's better to critique the overall cost of academic publishing instead of trying to break out type-setting.
My $0.02, anyway.
By 0xWTF 2025-12-1820:37 Awesome, thanks for posting your experience with an interesting model.
By DonaldPShimoda 2025-12-1819:254 reply A lot of discussion about the benefits/drawbacks of open access publishing, but I don't see anybody talking about the other thing that's coming along with this commitment to open access: the ACM is introducing a "premium" membership tier behind which various features of the Digital Library will be paywalled. From their info page [0], "premium" features include:
The AI-generated article summaries has been getting a lot of discussion in my social circles. They have apparently fed many (all?) papers into some LLM to generate summaries... which is absurd when you consider that practically every article has an abstract as part of its text and submission. These abstract were written by the authors and have been reviewed more than almost any other part of the articles, so they are very unlikely to contain errors. In contrast, multiple of my colleagues have found errors of varying scales in the AI-generated summaries of their own papers — many of which are actually longer than the existing abstracts.* Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery * AI-generated article summaries * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions * Advanced search * Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and citations received * Bulk citation exports and PDF downloadsIn addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials.
I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/premium
[1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."
By jojomodding 2025-12-2121:17 They also prefix every PDF with a useless page telling you the authors (which are already listed on the first (now second) page anyways) and a list telling you which of the author's universities were members of ACM Open and paid for the publishing via flatrate.
The latter is of course the actual reason for this extra page, but it is also entirely useless information since the people reading the paper don't care. The people writing the paper are also usually annoyed by this (source: I'm an author of one such paper)
> * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
Also AI-generated, presumably.
By DonaldPShimoda 2025-12-208:06 Yeah, that's my assumption, too. I hate it.
By th0ma5 2025-12-1822:17 I came here with this perspective and it made the rest of the thread feel like submarine PR cleanup for this mess. Perhaps they can afford to keep their high profits because of AI company money?
I'm kinda okay with putting the AI slop behind a paywall if it means nobody will actually see it.
By b33j0r 2025-12-1823:22 There will be customers even though it is a useless feature tier.
Monetizing knowledge-work is nearly impossible if you want everyone to be rational about it. You gotta go for irrational customers like university and giant-org contracts, and that will happen here because of institutional inertia.
