Minutes of the discussion at SIGSAM-ISSAC business meeting on July 18, 2024

[cpernet]

This thread gathers the main arguments raised during the discussion that happened after SIGSAM business meeting during ISSAC in Raleigh on July 18, 2024.

[cpernet]

The 15k$ required to put SIGSAM finances back in balance is a limited amount: if it financed on ISSAC's registrations, this would correspond to an increase of approximately 150$ per registration (ISSAC has usually 110-150 participants, from which 30-50 student registrations would not contribute to the same amount). This amount is marginal compared to the cost of attending an international conference (travel, hotel, etc), and should therefore not be deterring participants from attending.
ISSAC registration fees have remained very contained over the last 30 years and did not follow inflation. We should be careful not to undervalue our conference.

[cpernet]

Part of the activities in our community relate to software development: computer algebra systems, software implementations, experiments, etc. This is illustrated by software demonstration sessions at ISSAC and by the Richard Dimick Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering applied to Computer Algebra.
There is a concern that this activity will not be considered as important in the scenario of a merge with SIGACT, which seem more focused on Theoretical Computer Science.

[cpernet]

The cost for having ISSAC sponsored by ACM are hard to justify compared to the services actually provided by ACM to ISSAC.
This year's "in sponsorship" organization was mostly an additional burden to the organizers.
Overall the prize for Option 1 splits approximatively as follows:
* 4k$ of ACM overhead for sponsoring ISSAC
* 15k$ of ACM overhead to SIGSAM
* between 700$ and 1800$ per paper (either paid by the corresponding author or by their institution through institutionnal subscriptions to ACM Open) so approximately 40k$
On the other hand, the main benefit viewed in return is to keep being affiliated to the ACM, which brings a well recognized label of quality and clearly locates our field within computer science.

[cpernet]

Following on the benefits of being affiliated to the ACM:
* colleagues in China identified that being affiliated to the ACM was of great help for obtaining national grants. Loosing this label may make it much more difficult for them to apply for research grants.
* The ACM label is also very helpfull in hiring committees. Loosing the ACM label may make it harder for applicants and jury members to convince that ISSAC papers belong to a computer science research field of high quality.

[cpernet]

It is not clear whether the quality reputation of ACM publications will remain once the Author Payer model will be fully deployed.

[cpernet]

LIPICS publications are selective and in the case that they decline ISSAC then Option 3 is in trouble as there are no other free services with such a reputation. Overall Option 3 is rather vague and needs further investigation, including contact with the LIPICs publisher team to clarify its viability.

[cpernet]

The vote proposed to the community is unclear:
- is it binding or just a poll to measure the opinion of the SIGSAM and ISSAC communities ?
-> Answer: it is a poll which will help SIGSAM board together with ISSAC Steering committee to then take action
- according to the ISSAC and SIGSAM bylaws, the termination of SIGSAM (following Options 2 and 3) and the changes of status of ISSAC can not be decided under such a vote.
-> Answer: indeed, if such radical change need to be made, the process of the bylaws will be followed, including via the organization of dedicated votes addressed to each community concerned.

[cpernet]

The requirement to organize ISSAC in full sponsorship with the ACM (which will be enforeced with Options 1 and 2) causes problems in some countries, e.g. for Germany: the conference would be considered as a private event, external to the local organizing university, which will then prevent the conference to benefit from the facilities at the same fares as they would if the conference were run in the "in cooperation with" model. This is expected to make a major difference in the budget of the conference.

[joshuagrochow]

LIPICS publications are selective and in the case that they decline ISSAC then Option 3 is in trouble as there are no other free services with such a reputation. Overall Option 3 is rather vague and needs further investigation, including contact with the LIPICs publisher team to clarify its viability.

If for some reason LIPIcs doesn't work out, it may be worth considering EPTCS as another option: https://about.eptcs.org/.
- "Fully" OA - for readers, authors, and event organizers. No fees
- arXiv overlay, so its longevity is essentially guaranteed by the arXiv
- Run by the Open Publishing Association, which is an unincorporated association dedicated to publishing OA.

It has some overlap in scope with SIGACT, but I don't think the same concern raised about SIGACT would apply here. If you look at their list of (405) published volumes (https://published.eptcs.org/), you see that they cover a larger umbrella of topics than SIGACT does, and I imagine they would welcome ISSAC proceedings, though of course that should be checked with their editorial board.

My impression is that LIPIcs seems to provide some editorial assistance (?) and produces volumes with a consistent "LIPIcs" style, whereas I think for EPTCS it is much more up to the conference organizers. But I am not sure about this.