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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?
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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.
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) 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. :)
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.
rip aaron swartz.
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.
