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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

> 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).

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