
A letter to the Editorial Board, Journal of Algorithms (2003) [pdf] - LHopital
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/joalet.pdf
======
mixedmath
For those who didn't read, allow me to briefly summarize the contents of this
letter:

\--------------

This is a letter written by Knuth to the board members of the Journal of
Algorithms. This journal means something special to Knuth, as he was one of
the creators of the journal in 1979.

In this letter, Knuth describes the evolution of the journal. It used to cost
about 30 cents per page in the 80s, but costs began to skyrocket in the 90s.
The costs really began to skyrocket when Elsevier became the publisher.

Knuth argues that in the 80s, it was publishers who were responsible for all
the typing, editing, and formatting --- things which were quite hard. But now
(after Knuth made and proliferated TeX, which became still easier with LaTeX)
authors and software do much of this work. So Knuth argues that costs should
have gone down, not up.

The remaining several pages involve Knuth inviting the editorial board to
consider the future of the journal. He paints four broad options:

1\. Should they stay with Elsevier? 2\. Should they switch publishers? 3\.
Should they go towards a SIAM model? 4\. Or should they do something like the
arXiv or PLoS and become pure open access, perhaps through finding some
university (or universities) to host them?

\-------------

I'll also note what ended up happening.

The entire board resigned shortly afterwards, as they could not come to an
agreement with Elsevier. Then Knuth (and other editors from the Journal of
Algorithms) started the ACM Transactions in Algorithms shortly after.

The Journal of Algorithms (now under Elsevier but without Knuth) stopped being
published a few years later, in 2010.

Some other editorial boards resigned from Elsevier as well --- with varying
levels of impact.

~~~
unwind
Thanks!

Naturally I was curious about the big looming question "ok, so what is the
cost/page for the new ACM TALG, then"? I surfed the journal's pages (at
[http://talg.acm.org/index.cfm](http://talg.acm.org/index.cfm)) for a while
but was unable to come up with an answer.

A subcription to just the journal is $360, I assume that's yearly. But the
number of issues per year seems to vary, and I failed completely to figure out
the page count for a typical issue. I hope it's cheaper than before! :)

Also, I _love_ that the journal has submission rules that limit authors to max
one paper regarding P != NP per 24 months:

 _No author may submit more than one paper to J. ACM, ACM Trans. on
Algorithms, ACM Trans. on Computation Theory, or SIAM J. on Computing in any
24 month period, purporting to resolve the P versus NP question or related
long-standing questions in complexity theory, except by invitation of the
Editor-in-Chief._

I wonder if such limitations are needed/common in other fields, or if it's
more of an in-joke. Also, there's a typo in Knuth's address on the Editors
page. :)

~~~
utopcell
Access to the whole ACM digital library is $99 if you are an ACM member (which
costs another $99 yearly,) so it is really $360 only if you want the printed
version.

------
yorwba
Aftermath:
[http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf](http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf)

See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editorial_boards)

------
metaphor
This year, I decided to pony up for ACM lifetime dues with digital library
access. That's $3960, or 20 years worth of dues at this year's rate. I think
that's a fair cost for a professional in industry.

IEEE, on the other hand, is an annoyance. Annual dues are $198 this year too,
which essentially gets you a print subscription to Spectrum magazine (free
online; bloated with ads) and Google-hosted e-mail account (no ads; internally
spammed by IEEE), but that's effectively it. With a basic 3 papers/mo digital
subscription (which should be included at no additional cost as part of annual
dues IMHO), that'll set me back $425.40 this year alone...over 2x ACM annual
dues for a tease of relevant content. Despite having spent the past few years
wait until the end of January to internally deliberate whether I should stay
legit and renew or seek alternative means, I nevertheless end up paying the
piper for another year.

For all intents and purposes, Elsevier can suck it. About 2 years ago, a few
of their business development guys came to my division to pitch a new service.
There's only one other guy (PhD candidate at the time) in my division who
follows the literature, but he wasn't there for the pitch. That gave me free
reign to take up the entire Q&A session pointing out broken or deficient
aspects and subtly jab at the irrelevance of their product to our mission. In
the end, the bosses didn't bite on the product...they would have taken us to
the cleaners otherwise.

------
jmole
academic journals are such a scam... the absolute worst place to have a for-
profit business model.

rip aaron swartz.

~~~
mirimir
Indeed.

That's a relatively recent development, however. Not that long ago, they were
virtually not-for-profit firms. Then they got acquired. And restructured to
maximize profit.

------
euyyn
One thing is not knowing how to be brief, as he says, and another one is not
wanting to reach the point. What's the TL;DR?

~~~
kevindong
In essence: the publisher (Elsevier) is charging too much for doing too
little. As the editorial board, please informally vote on what to do (change
to a University publisher, change to ACM publishing, change to a University
press publisher, change for-profit publishers, do nothing and keep Elsevier).

------
javajosh
Elsevier sounds like the Martin Shkreli of academic publishing. All class.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli)

