Special Interest Group on CRAP

You’re probably wondering what SIGCRAP is. It’s not a special interest group of ACM. It’s a play on words that was motivated by my recent thoughts on the nature of academic publishing, and the role of professional societies.

I’m a researcher in computer science, and I’ve been a member of several professional societies during my career, including ACM, IEEE, the American Mathematical Society, SIAM, MAA and some others. These organizations were founded with the purpose of furthering research in their respective fields, and as part of that mission,have published high quality scientific journals. Prior to the emergence of the Internet, they played a premier role in promoting communication and publishing in their academic disciplines.

Unfortunately there is growing evidence that professional societies are failing to keep up with the times. In particular, their sheer bulk is becoming an impediment to progress in the evolution of publishing. The reason is that in the days of traditional paper publishing, they required a sizable staff to support the activity of editing, printing, binding, and distribution of paper journals. They now depend on the revenue stream from paper journals to sustain their staff, while at the same time, their members are not being well served by clinging to a traditional model of scientific publishing that ignores emerging technology.

I have been closely involved with a professional society that operates under a different model, namely the IACR. During my years of service, I have served as conference general chair, treasurer, director, membership secretary, and president. All of this was done while receiving no compensation from the society. All officers and directors serve as volunteers, and receive no compensation for their services. The president is the only one whose travel is paid, but I was able to avoid even that during my presidency because my employer paid for my conference travel. The society publishes a paper journal, maintains a web site, run an election every year, runs six international conferences and workshops per year, distributes a newsletter electronically, and maintains online conference registration and membership services. The annual dues are $88, of which about 75% is given to Springer-Verlag to pay for the journal of the society.

This is a ridiculous contrast to the bloated bureacracy of the IEEE, AMS, or ACM.

Consider the quote of Anthony Durniak of IEEE:

Free open access runs the risk of destroying professional societies.

Yeah, so? These societies exist to serve their members, and the needs of members have changed dramatically in the last decade. If the members are best served by disbanding or at least shrinking the budget of a society, then it’s time for new leadership of the society to make it happen.

How much does it cost to publish something on the web? Very little. The total monetary budget for this site is $6.00 per month, provided through a commercial service provider with a professionally run data center. Moreover, this site carries no advertising (yet), is backed up, and has 24×7 coverage for technical support.

How could it possibly cost so little? The answer is through virtual hosting. In this arrangement, the machine that serves this information also serves other domains. Moreover, the falling cost of computer hardware makes it incredibly cheap to keep the service running. The hardware for this site probably only cost about $600 capital expenditure, which can be amortized over several years. The fact that I’m only paying $72 per year is not so shocking when you do the mathematics.

Profession societies serve many functions of course, including the management of a budget, the management of meetings, and providing member services. This has some cost, and I’m not advocating that we disband all professional societies. I’m simply pointing out that professional societies need to wean themselves from their fat budgets and large staffs.

Publication services

Just look at what you get for being a member of the American Mathematical Society:

• Free Subscriptions to Notices and Bulletin
  • The cruel fact is that very few members read the Bulletin, and the society has done little to make it appeal to a broader segment of the society. The notices is available online, so there is little reason to continue to send out a paper version to every member. No doubt some members would like to receive it on paper, but there is no option of reading it online only, because most members would opt for this, reducing the income stream for the society.
• Discounts on AMS publications.
  • This doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Why should it cost more to buy a book from the AMS if you are not a member?
• Reduced meeting registration fees.
  • Running meetings is expensive, but shouldn’t the cost of attending a meeting cover the cost of the meeting? Why are we cost shifting to others?
• Employment services
  • Why are these services not paid by employers, just as they are in all other fields?
• Membership directory
  • The directory used to be maintained by humans who performed data entry, but now it’s mostly done online by the members themselves. Once an online system is set up, it costs almost nothing to maintain. Members receive a paper copy of this that is almost instantly out of date, so members routinely go to the online service anyway. The paper copy should be sold to people
    who still want to buy it, but not required as a cost of membership.
• Electronic members-only services
  • Well sort of. Just not the ones members would most want, namely online access to the publications or database services. The primary reason why I dropped my membership in the AMS after twenty-five years is because I did not have access to MathSciNet as a benefit of membership.

• Email notification services.
  • Leaving aside the question of whether many members want to sign up for an opt-in spam service to sell more books of the society, the cost of running this service is essentially zero.
• Email forwarding service.
  • Geez - they want to *charge* for this? Have they heard of hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, and all the other free services around the world? The cost of maintaining an email forwarding service is about five bucks a month for the entire society (I have one several that I run on the same machine).
• Group life insurance program.
  • Life insurance companies *want* this business. It’s not really a benefit of the society to allow a company to market to the members.
• Opportunity to apply for an AMS credit card.
  • You have to smile at the ridiculousness of this one. I must get a new credit card offer at least once a week.
• Ability to renew online
  • Since I designed and implemented an online registration system like this for IACR, I can say with certainty that this is not a big deal. Responsive member of societies figure out how to do such things with volunteer effort, and are able to find members who are more than willing to do a service for their society.

The ugly truth is that the regular membership in the AMS is $152. The true cost of services delivered by the AMS to members should be about $30.

Do I advocate the disbanding of professional societies? Certainly not. In fact, I am a strong advocate for the role of professional societies, and I have dedicated a large fraction of time in my career to professional service. Professional societies should be participatory organizations, and should be run by people who care more about the health of their profession than about the entitlement of the staff of the society. For the staff it’s a job - for the member it will be a passion.