The cost of reading research. A study of Computer Science publication venues

What does the cost of academic publishing look like to the common researcher today? Our goal is to convey the current state of academic publishing, specifically in regards to the field of computer science and provide analysis and data to be used as a basis for future studies. We will focus on author and reader costs as they are the primary points of interaction within the publishing world. In this work, we restrict our focus to only computer science in order to make the data collection more feasible (the authors are computer scientists) and hope future work can analyze and collect data across all academic fields. Today, there is an echo of the decade-old concerns of Knuth, Jordan, and Odlyzko regarding publishers that pose an unnecessary cost burden on academic readers. In 2003, Donald Knuth questioned the subscription cost to Journal of Algorithms, which was increasing year after year (adjusted for inflation), causing the price per page to double from 1980 to 2003 (1). Michael Jordan along with 40 other members of the editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) famously resigned in 2001 in protest of papers being locked behind the paywalls of its publisher (2). Similarly, Andrew Odlyzko discussed how technology eliminates the need for middlemen and publishers, claiming that librarians were an unnecessary block between