I thought what I quoted was about ACM/IEEE. $198 per year (less than that for students) to the ACM gets you unlimited access to their online archives. I didn't check the IEEE rate, as I rarely encounter a paper I have to get from them instead of from ACM -- is it much more? What am I missing out on by not checking Elsevier's stash?
I am in math rather than CS/EE. I am not precisely sure, and indeed Elsevier goes to some effort to make their pricing complicated, but I am pretty sure it runs well into the thousands.
I am a professor at a reasonably good state university, having just come from Stanford. At Stanford they subscribed to everything, and here our department picks and chooses so that I constantly run into paywalls despite a university subscription.
I don't know how much it would be to upgrade to Stanford-level access, but if it were $200 a professor I assume they'd do it. (Certainly I'd pay $200 from my salary for that.) I'm guessing high four or low five figures per prof in the department.
I'm guessing ACM/IEEE are nonprofits? Kudos to them for making their prices reasonable. There are some professional organizations in math (e.g. the AMS) that do something similar. But unfortunately a lot of our journals are published by for-profit companies.
The ACM and the IEEE are the key professional societies for computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering research.
Wikipedia says the IEEE is non-profit, not sure about the ACM.
IEEE weights towards the EE and high-math end of things, ACM weights towards the CS end of things.
The Journal of the ACM is about $300USD/yr for print/online access (nonmember).
I have a wide variety of interests and would prefer to have full access to about 5-7 journals (Some Wiley, some Elsevier). Assuming $300/year prices that's a pretty decent sized price to keep up with research interests. :-(
