This is a good article going into detail as to why open access in ACM is expensive: its used for pay for K-12 education and other programs. I have some problems with the article though. A thread.
First off, it suggests that open access is expensive, and that we need to have some revenue stream to cover costs. This is not true in CS, where type-setting, copy-editing etc are done by the authors themselves. For example, JMLR is an open-access journal without *any* costs.
The cost of just publishing open-access papers is minimal. The author suggests that things like ACM's keywords and digital library help discover articles. In my experience, Google Scholar has rendered this moot. I don't think ACM's Digital Library is worth losing open access.
Second, the tone of the article seems to suggest if we want open-access, we either have to increase conf reg fees, or we have to give up activities like K-12 education. This is false.
We simply decouple educational and outreach activities from open-access publishing. Why must they be done by the same institution?
Of all fields, I think it is in computer science, that industry would be most sympathetic and willing to sponsor programs meant to educate their future work-force. There are tons of educational programs out there without ACM's support.
One of the nice things about this decoupling is that when people donate or pay money, they know what it is going for. When ACM charges $700 for open-access, they don't tell authors that it is for sponsoring K-12. They make it seem as if its that expensive to provide open access.
People are more likely to donate money when they know what it is going to be used for. I'm sure folks are happy to donate to K-12 education, if that is what it is explicitly billed as. I don't like it being coupled with open-access: authors without money suffer.
So in summary, I reject this idea that open access is this hard-to-obtain expensive thing: journals have been silently doing it for 20 years! I reject the idea that open access means no educational or outreach activities. It is quite possible to do both.
I don't think anybody does science hoping for it to be locked away. Scientific articles *must* be freely available, especially because some of it is paid for by tax-payer money. But also because that is how science thrives, by the free exchange of ideas.
