[HN Gopher] ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile
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ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile
Author : mitchbob
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-04-07 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.acm.org)
| sixtyfourbits wrote:
| This is nice and all, but there's no valid justification for
| _any_ of the material in the digital library to be locked behind
| a paywall in the first place. Most of the research published by
| ACM was paid for by taxpayers, and authors have to either sign
| over copyright or grant exclusive publishing rights. To be fair,
| ACM 's fees are _far_ more reasonable than the big publishing
| companies, and there are open access options available (at a cost
| to authors).
|
| They opened the whole thing up for unlimited access for a brief
| period during the pandemic, but decided to walk that back after
| just three months. If you know where to look, there's a 500gb
| torrent floating round with the 480k+ papers that were accessible
| as of June 2020.
|
| It's sad that in this day and age, particularly with the
| widespread acceptance of open source, most academic publications
| are still behind a paywall. We shouldn't even be having
| discussions about "open access"; the "open" part should just be
| implicit.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Agreed, and the post does say they plan to make it all freely
| available within five years. Why the delay? I don't know.
| samth wrote:
| Their plan is to open everything once they have enough
| organizations signed up for their ACM OPEN plan (basically
| once they replace the current income from the digital
| library).
| mindcrime wrote:
| Now if only we could get IEEE to make the same kind of
| committment...
| okennedy wrote:
| To their credit, US and EU funding agencies agree with you!
| Back at the start of 2016 or so, the NSF started adding clauses
| to grant contracts requiring that all research supported by new
| NSF awards be deposited in its open access repository:
| https://par.nsf.gov/ Results from there don't seem to show up
| in major search engines, neither academic (Google Scholar,
| DBLP), nor general (DDG, Google). Nevertheless, many ACM
| articles from the past 5 years can be found there. Similar
| repositories exist for other funding agencies.
|
| Also worth noting: Many ACM publications will be cross-posted
| on ArXiV (https://arxiv.org) or faculty webpages. It's an open
| secret that many faculty will publish "preprint" versions of
| their articles there after the paper passes peer review, but
| before they sign any licensing agreement with a publisher.
| kabdib wrote:
| Nice. I used to maintain an ACM membership (when I wasn't working
| for a company that provided their Digital Library access), and
| going through the most recent SIGs and things like Computing
| Surveys were a critical part of my continuing learning.
|
| Papers are a lot more accessible now, and I have enough
| "firehose" to read without needing an ACM sub, but this is
| useful.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| This is big
| drivers99 wrote:
| Looks like they have a bunch of papers about my current interest
| (FORTH - in fact there there is (was: final issue 1994) a
| SIGFORTH). I came to ask how you actually read the papers but I
| found out there are PDF icons you can click on when you do a
| search on https://dl.acm.org/
| rzzzt wrote:
| I came here wondering if anyone has already dug out this piece
| of information. It's wonderful news and the announcement does
| mention the ACM Digital Library, but a link would have been
| very welcome.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Are there any gems in here that were previously unavailable?
| di4na wrote:
| Barbara Liskov "Programming with Abstract Data Types"
|
| And basically all the CACM and ACM conferences paper. So like.
| 50 years of implementing stuff.
| criddell wrote:
| I always wondered why they called their organization the
| _Association for Computing Machinery_. It sounds like an
| association for computers, not people.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Computers used to be people. Until the advent of electronic
| computers, computing machines were all mechanical or elecro-
| mechanical affairs. This was the world view of the founders.
| jandrese wrote:
| Computers used to be people, but machinery was never people.
| [deleted]
| eesmith wrote:
| Dating from the 1940s!
|
| > The ACM was founded in 1947 under the name Eastern
| Association for Computing Machinery, which was changed the
| following year to the Association for Computing Machinery. -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Computing_Mach.
| ..
|
| Actually, Google Scholar pointed me to a 1933 example (!) at
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/1167450
|
| > In the computing field, a number of technics have been
| reported (346, 348, 413) whereby correlations and other
| computations may be computed by means of standard computing
| machinery. Hull (373) described the most elaborate computing
| machine for making the almost interminable calculations
| utilized in the partial and multiple correlation technics for
| combining tests according to optimum weights.
|
| along with other citations from the 1930s.
| mooneater wrote:
| Go further, open it all.
| convolvatron wrote:
| tfa states an intention of doing so in the next 5 years.
| sul_tasto wrote:
| Does a curated list of important papers exist? It would be great
| to have a guide to this resource.
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| Wonder if this is related to,
|
| > As of July 1, 2022, you will no longer have to access the
| O'Reilly Learning platform as a benefit of your ACM membership.
| Despite our best efforts, O'Reilly Media is unwilling to continue
| to license their content to ACM for members.
|
| The O'Reilly library is great and justified the prices of an ACM
| membership, but I don't think journal access and my monthly copy
| of _Communications_ will be enough to keep me come renewal.
|
| Unless, of course, they find something equally valuable to
| replace the O'Reilly catalog with.
| Someone wrote:
| Why would it be related? Losing the O'Reilly platform makes
| your ACM membership less valuable. I don't see this making it
| more valuable.
|
| If anything, it makes it less valuable, as subscribing won't
| gain you access to papers published before 2000 anymore (you'll
| still have it, but you also will have it is you aren't an ACM
| member)
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| I didn't realize these articles were already available for
| me. You're right then that this doesn't exactly add value to
| an ACM membership. But maybe this is to make room to expand
| the ACM Digital Library in other ways.
| jrootabega wrote:
| That's a shame. I don't think I got that email yet; do you have
| the subject line?
|
| I actually joined ACM because O'Reilly did some sketchy stuff
| with my Safari membership a couple years ago. They sent me an
| email with an offer to upgrade from Safari to "O'Reilly online
| learning" with a discount for the first year, and the links
| were all going to genuine domains. But whenever I tried to
| actually do it, there was no way for me to see/do the offer on
| their site, despite being within the offer window. I wrote to
| confirm I wanted to use the discount, and asked for help, and
| they just wrote back and said "send us the email."
|
| So instead, I used all my download tokens (which also broke and
| required contacting support), canceled, and got an ACM
| membership for much cheaper. (Which I would have done anyway
| had I had a reason to seek it out.) Oh well. There is enough
| web content today that I don't think it matters that much.
| geodel wrote:
| Yes, I got email , I think yesterday. O'Reilly was really
| useful platform for learning. It seems they couldn't
| renegotiate it for ACM users. To be honest I could have paid
| more to have O'reilly access.
| ellen364 wrote:
| > do you have the subject line?
|
| The email I received had subject line: Notice Regarding Your
| Access to O'Reilly Content
| mooneater wrote:
| I will quit ACM, this is the only perk that mattered.
| czx4f4bd wrote:
| Well, shit. I really loved that benefit. I might have to see if
| my employer will pay for a membership.
|
| Now I have to figure out if there's a way to save all my
| playlists and notes. Guess I didn't think about the potential
| downsides of storing all those in a system I don't own.
| darrylb42 wrote:
| $100 for a ACM membership $500 for O'Reilly. I can see why
| O'Reilly didn't want to renew. Learning materials are pretty
| slim with O'Reilly removed.
| volkadav wrote:
| TBH I don't know what O'Reilly is thinking with that price
| point. I wish they had a "lite" version with just book access
| or something, because honestly that's all I ever use.
| geodel wrote:
| You are right of course. Maybe a narrower selection would
| work, instead of zero access now.
| sitkack wrote:
| To the ACM, Thank You!
|
| It is important for our industry and for all of humanity that
| this information be freely available to all.
| deafpiano wrote:
| Should we really thank them for doing something that they could
| have done the whole time? They could make the entire catalog free
| and open to all if they actually cared about advancing the field.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| ACM is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. It's not like they're
| profiteering ( _cough_ Elsevier). They have to cover costs
| somehow.
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(page generated 2022-04-07 23:00 UTC)