[HN Gopher] ACM Digital Library Archive is Open Access with 50 Y...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       ACM Digital Library Archive is Open Access with 50 Years of
       Published Records
        
       Author : yarapavan
       Score  : 349 points
       Date   : 2022-05-20 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
        
       | khaledh wrote:
       | Original announcement thread:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30944881
        
       | flakiness wrote:
       | So some people already posted now-accessible papers that worth a
       | look. Here is my random pick: "A relational model of data for
       | large shared data banks" [1]
       | 
       | It's a defining paper for RDB data model. I think it's not a
       | exaggeration to say all the RDB history starts here. (The history
       | itself is covered not by acm but by ieee [2]).
       | 
       | [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362384.362685
       | 
       | [2]
       | https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16074372884446179...
        
         | teloli wrote:
         | And interestingly enough such a landmark paper got rejected
         | initially: http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/reject.html
        
       | hazelnut-tree wrote:
       | This is a treasure chest of computer-related papers from 1951 -
       | 2000. The topics span the full breadth of computing, including
       | topics that might not immediately come to mind.
       | 
       | An example: I posted a 1984 paper about end-user documentation
       | for all types of users (including developers) from the ACM
       | archive. Despite the age of the paper, you'll recognise the
       | questions about documentation even today.
       | 
       |  _' Those silly bastards': A report on some users' views of
       | documentation (1984)_
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31003306
        
         | maire wrote:
         | Documentation and user interface face the same issues.
         | 
         | The biggest mistake engineers make is to expose the internal
         | workings of the software in ways irrelevant to the user.
         | 
         | The biggest mistake marketing makes is to focus on upselling. I
         | believe this is the reason why Google beat out Yahoo in the
         | search space.
        
       | muxneo wrote:
       | An immense benefit to the technical community..thanks a lot
        
       | taubek wrote:
       | As a student I've often used their DL. I really had a bunch of
       | great resources.
        
       | musesum wrote:
       | In 1975, my high school's "Independent Science Study" class took
       | a field trip to the Crerar Library at the U of Chicago[1]. In the
       | stacks was a paper on AI that changed my life[2].
       | 
       | It was a 3 hour drive, each way. Now it takes 3 seconds.
       | 
       | [1] https://goo.gl/maps/h3xCccBMQDBqQXhD7
       | 
       | [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1460833.1460840
        
         | ThomasBHickey wrote:
         | I worked as a librarian there in the early 70's. It was a
         | different world!
        
       | dwringer wrote:
       | Wow, this is great! I'm happy to see "Connection Machine Lisp:
       | Fine-Grained Parallel Symbolic Processing"[0] in here, free at
       | last. I actually bought that paper in my undergrad CS days just
       | because it's so intriguing (IMHO).
       | 
       | [0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/319838.319870
        
       | robomartin wrote:
       | Ah, cool, a paper I wrote back in 1985 is now open access. It
       | only took 37 years.
       | 
       | Well, at least I can send my kid (recent CS grad) a link and he
       | can laugh at what was doing almost 40 years ago. Robotics then
       | wasn't what it is today!
        
         | ghostpepper wrote:
         | You should link to the paper so we can all laugh!
        
       | SemanticStrengh wrote:
       | Is there a way to filter by number of reads popularity? Number of
       | citations?
        
         | webmaven wrote:
         | Yes, search results can be sorted by citations.
        
       | status200 wrote:
       | All of the articles that I have searched/browsed are requiring
       | login / payment... am I missing something?
        
       | yarapavan wrote:
       | Announcement: https://associationsnow.com/2022/05/the-way-things-
       | were-why-...
       | 
       | ...as a part of its landmark campaign for its 75th anniversary
       | celebrations, ACM is opening up a large portion of its archives,
       | making the first 50 years of its published records--more than
       | 117,500 documents dating from 1951 to 2000--accessible to the
       | public without a login.
       | 
       | * A paper from the inaugural issue of ACM Transactions on
       | Mathematical Software in 1975:
       | https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/355626.355636
       | 
       | * The UNIX time-sharing system by Ritchie & Thompson.
       | https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800009.808045
       | 
       | * A Conversation with Steve Jobs.
       | https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/63334.63336
       | 
       | Edit: More info -
       | 
       | In January 2020, ACM launched an ambitious five-year plan to
       | transition the Association into an Open Access Publisher. The
       | foundation of that plan is a new model called ACM Open, which
       | asks research institutions around the world to underwrite the
       | costs of publication for their affiliated authors. Over the past
       | two years, nearly 200 research institutions have already signed
       | on to ACM Open and ACM is fast approaching the first major
       | milestone for the transition, when approximately 20% of ACM's
       | newly published articles are Open Access upon publication in the
       | ACM Digital Library.
       | 
       | Source: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/5/260362-thanks-for-
       | the-...
        
         | shortformblog wrote:
         | Hey, can we get a mod to update the headline? I think the lack
         | of info about the time period is confusing people about what's
         | available and what's not. (I wrote the announcement piece
         | linked here, FYI.)
        
         | ArtWomb wrote:
         | 50 years of SIGGRAPH, looking forward to it ;)
        
           | dagmx wrote:
           | Sort of. For most production related content in the ACM
           | library, you'll still only get the abstracts.
        
             | musicale wrote:
             | SIGGRAPH is behind the times. SIGCOMM has been open access
             | for years.
             | 
             | It's a shame too since SIGGRAPH runs ACM's most popular
             | conference(s) with many thousands of attendees and high
             | registration fees ($875 "discounted" pregistration for a
             | virtual conference? are you kidding?) and can almost
             | certainly afford the negligible costs for digital
             | publication.
             | 
             | Well here's hoping we'll get real open access for
             | everything by ... 2025. ;-/
             | 
             | Until then: google scholar, sci-hub, or donate your $99 to
             | ACM.
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | musicale wrote:
         | > asks research institutions around the world to underwrite the
         | costs of publication for their affiliated authors
         | 
         | The actual marginal cost for a digital publication is
         | negligible, as demonstrated by arxiv.org, archive.org, and sci-
         | hub.
         | 
         | The reason why ACM and IEEE charge so much for digital library
         | access is that they use the money for unrelated purposes.
        
           | seoaeu wrote:
           | Unrelated to the narrow task of file hosting, but entirely
           | related to the missions of those nonprofit organizations.
           | Some of the fees go towards the cost for hosting subsequent
           | iterations of the very conferences the papers were presented
           | at
        
           | pridkett wrote:
           | While peer review isn't perfect - it's helpful. Arxiv isn't
           | peer reviewed. Most things in ACM journals and conferences
           | are. That process costs money because it takes people and
           | time to do it well. Journal subscriptions are often not
           | enough to recover those costs.
           | 
           | As for sci-hub? They're just taking the finished work. It's
           | like saying software shouldn't cost much because The Pirate
           | Bay can deliver software for free.
        
             | mrek0 wrote:
             | The reviewers don't get paid for doing the reviews in the
             | peer review system..
        
           | ThomasBHickey wrote:
           | Publication in an ACM journal involves a lot more than just
           | accepting a paper as-is.
        
         | aluminussoma wrote:
         | The link for "The UNIX time-sharing system" only provides a
         | 1-page PDF of the abstract. I believe the correct PDF is
         | located at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361011.361061
         | 
         | It wasn't clear to me by looking at the pages themselves. I
         | hope usability will not be a huge issue and negate the benefit
         | of this open access!
        
           | shortformblog wrote:
           | Hey, the author of the piece. For context here: I included
           | the link to the 1973 abstract rather than the 1974 document
           | because it was the first mention of UNIX in the ACM archive,
           | which I made clear in the piece but got a little lost in the
           | comment here.
        
         | ghostpepper wrote:
         | Off topic but does anyone happen to know why the announcement
         | page returns a 403 when accessed from a command line browser
         | (lynx)?
        
         | est31 wrote:
         | I remember reading up on Karp's 21 problems paper and
         | encountering the paper from Cook that established that boolean
         | satisfiability was NP complete. It was published in ACM, very
         | glad that it's available now:
         | https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800157.805047
        
         | retcon wrote:
         | I don't mean this negatively at all but I am daydreaming of a
         | time machine and taking this decision back to 1995 and tripping
         | over all the technology fads we might have been spared. Good.
         | This is what makes it worth having children for.
        
       | WalterGR wrote:
       | It would appear this isn't a time-limited thing:
       | 
       | > Vicki L. Hanson, the group's CEO, noted that the ACM Digital
       | Library initiative is part of a broader effort to make its
       | archives available via open access by 2025.
       | 
       | > "Our goal is to have it open in a few years, but there's very
       | real costs associated with [the open-access work]," Hanson said.
       | "We have models so that we can pay for it."
        
         | musicale wrote:
         | USENIX has been open access for years. Some ACM conferences and
         | journals (e.g. SIGCOMM/CCR) have been open access for several
         | years.
         | 
         | One step that ACM could take that wouldn't require any
         | technical changes to their existing infrastructure would be to
         | officially offer republication and redistribution rights to any
         | non-commercial digital library including arxiv.org,
         | archive.org, sci-hub, etc..
        
       | freefaler wrote:
       | It's sad that we still need scihub for the research already paid
       | in many cases by the taxpayers.
       | 
       | So scihub FTW!
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | I just searched for something at random, selected the first
       | search hit, and since I am no longer a member of the ACM, there
       | was a $15 charge to read the article.
        
         | czx4f4bd wrote:
         | It says that open access only covers articles from 1951 to
         | 2000.
        
           | protomyth wrote:
           | You can change the search to only search from 1951 to 2000 on
           | the left sidebar.
        
       | tokai wrote:
       | Its very nice that they made all those articles available. But it
       | is definitely not 50 years of published records made Open Access.
       | OA mirrors FOSS software in some ways and the users need many of
       | the same freedoms. Just making them available to read with the
       | same old copyright still attach is not enough.
       | 
       | The Budapest Declaration from 2002 that defined OA for the first
       | time states it very clearly:                 "By "open access" to
       | this literature, we mean its free availability on the public
       | internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy,
       | distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these
       | articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software,
       | or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial,
       | legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from
       | gaining access to the internet itself."
       | 
       | https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/
        
         | wolverine876 wrote:
         | Good points, but what is the copyright?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | philiplu wrote:
       | Nice - this means the May 1988 issue of CACM is freely available.
       | That's notable because the cover article is Cliff Stoll's
       | "Stalking the Wily Hacker" [1], with the material that later
       | became his book "The Cuckoo's Egg". But I've still got the dead-
       | tree version of that issue around somewhere in storage because of
       | another article, by Andrew Appel and Guy Jacobson, "The World's
       | Fastest Scrabble Algorithm" [2]. I coded that up back then, in
       | Pascal IIRC, and had a blast doing so.
       | 
       | [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/42411.42412
       | 
       | [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/42411.42420
        
       | jdlyga wrote:
       | I'm an ACM member. I just searched, and it still costs $5 to read
       | recent articles. And that's with a membership. But good on them
       | for opening access to older materials.
        
         | khaledh wrote:
         | I think your membership is just for the ACM itself, and doesn't
         | include the Digital Library[0]. My membership includes the DL
         | (for an extra $99/yr) and I have access to all recent articles.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options
        
       | haupt wrote:
       | Do we have to register on the site to get download access? I
       | found something from 1963 I'd like to download but there's no
       | download link[0]. I'm sure I must be making a mistake. I found
       | the article through the dl.acm.org search engine.
       | 
       | [0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1147/rd.24.0289
        
         | qbit42 wrote:
         | That's not published in an ACM venue, but that page has a link
         | with the DOI, https://doi.org/10.1147/rd.24.0289, that takes
         | you to the IEEE page with a download link.
        
           | haupt wrote:
           | I appreciate you including the DOI link in your comment. I
           | like the fact that ACM has released some articles but as
           | someone not entirely familiar with all the different ACM
           | publications I am unsure as to how to sufficiently limit my
           | search query to find downloadable articles. Perhaps they will
           | add a specific "open access" filter to their search (I
           | unsuccessfully tried searching "open access" but perhaps none
           | of the articles are indexed by their availability). Thank you
           | very much.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-05-20 23:00 UTC)