A goal of research is to ultimately to benefit society with research results available to the public. The conference work done by volunteers, and in the end tax payer funded, should aid this goal. The current model of major publishers such as IEEE or ACM, is to profit from restricting availability of results.
Lets have a look at the steps leading to the publication of a scientific result at a conference:
- Authors do research, write papers, funded e.g. by taxpayers
– for free (not paid by publisher). - Technical program committees organize the evaluation process
– for free. - Reviewers evaluate papers
– for free. - TPC processes reviews, decides on acceptance
– for free. - Authors of accepted papers pay the publisher to have their work included in proceedings.
- Publisher provides proceedings behind paywall, so readers have to pay the publisher to read the results in papers.
- Some “open access” model shift the step of paying for papers from reader to author, maintaining publisher profit.
- All quality control is done by the volunteers, not the publisher.
So authors, authors and volunteers work for free, then pay the publisher to make papers available for their profit, restricting access to the public.
What is the added value of the publisher to the community? Those without institutional subscriptions, e.g., our Linux kernel developer friends, are kept out. Publication cost can be prohibitively high, in particular in some parts of the world.
ECRTS moved to a genuine open access model (article processing fees covered from the conference budget via registrations) in 2017. Paper handling and extended web based access has been provided in collaboration with LIPIcs – Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics established in cooperation with Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics. Paper selection procedures and quality control remained unchanged, but accepted papers are made public for access without cost.
I consider the current restricted, for profit publication model or many conferences outdated: in the early days, before internet, quality control and dissemination of results were conflated into physical printed proceedings. For their (physical ) distribution publishers were needed. With the advent of the web, and quality control ensured by conference organizers only, established for profit publishers are no longer needed.