Author's institutions or corporations are requested to honor a page charge of $60.00 per printed page or part thereof, to help defray the cost of publication. Page charges apply to all contributions. Payment of page charges is not a condition of publication; editorial acceptance of a paper is unaffected by payment or nonpayment.SIAM also recently asked us for $72/page for a Journal on Computing paper.
I despise page charges. Authors do the research, write the papers, give the journals the copyright and now the journals want us to pay for the privilege. I know the charges are optional and come from research funds but we have other needs for the money. The page charges on a moderate-sized paper could, for example, send a grad student or two to a major conference.
We have problems in our field with expensive for-profit journals and papers that never appear in refereed journals at all. We need to encourage authors to send their articles to journals run by the non-profit societies. We should not then send them a bill for doing the right thing.
Not sure if you are reading comments on 8-year old posts. But do you know if J. ACM still does this? I know that SIAM does. But I also see that ACM Trans. Alg. recently stopped:
ReplyDeletehttp://talg.acm.org/Accepted.html
and I am curious why they stopped!