[HN Gopher] ACM Makes Thousands of Research Articles Freely Avai...
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       ACM Makes Thousands of Research Articles Freely Available; Opens
       First 50 Years
        
       Author : kulandai
       Score  : 235 points
       Date   : 2022-06-12 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.acm.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.acm.org)
        
       | nmstoker wrote:
       | I look forward to someone creating a curated list of particularly
       | influential papers over the years.
        
       | ddingus wrote:
       | Thank you! That is all.
        
       | cvccvroomvroom wrote:
       | Anyone else's company's employment agreement prevent them from
       | join a standards body without permission?
        
         | elric wrote:
         | Where are you from? Is it common for an employer to be able to
         | regulate what you do when you're not on the clock?
        
         | Jtsummers wrote:
         | Nope. I've even had them pay my membership costs for ACM and
         | IEEE and various SIGs or Societies within them. Why wouldn't
         | they want you to participate, even passively, in these
         | organizations?
        
         | bigbillheck wrote:
         | ACM is a professional organization, not a standards body.
        
       | WalterGR wrote:
       | If anyone is curious, here's the previous discussion:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31447465
       | 
       | "ACM Digital Library Archive is Open Access with 50 Years of
       | Published Records" (acm.org)
       | 
       | 473 points by yarapavan 23 days ago | 51 comments
        
         | khaledh wrote:
         | And here's the original discussion at the time of the
         | announcement:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30944881
         | ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile         177 points by
         | mitchbob 66 days ago | 49 comments
        
       | sam_lowry_ wrote:
        
         | javajosh wrote:
        
           | WalterGR wrote:
           | Could you not? Please?
           | 
           | Take a gander at the site guidelines linked in the footer.
        
       | kache_ wrote:
       | scihub?
        
       | shortformblog wrote:
       | I interviewed ACM's CEO recently on this topic, which has been
       | shared previously: https://associationsnow.com/2022/05/the-way-
       | things-were-why-...
       | 
       | Quick note: They are planning on opening the whole archive in a
       | few years but it is still a work in progress. The plan is for
       | 2025 for the whole archive to be opened. They released the first
       | 50 years now in part because it timed well to the 75th
       | anniversary.
       | 
       | Finally, the org's 75th anniversary livestream took place on
       | Friday, more info about it is here:
       | https://www.acm.org/75-celebration-event
        
         | nescioquid wrote:
         | Thanks for the article. I've wondered why they need to open
         | access to these papers in tranches. I had imagined there is
         | probably work to prepare each paper and possibly securing
         | agreements?
         | 
         | > "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."
         | 
         | This sort of confuses me even more. Is the "paying for it"
         | talking about the work needed to be done to make each paper
         | open-access, or is this talking about funding the ability to
         | host the papers?
         | 
         | Just curious about what the costs are that are mentioned and
         | the plan to cover those costs and how the results in needing to
         | open access to papers in tranches. Maybe the model could be
         | adopted by other journals, too?
        
           | shortformblog wrote:
           | While I don't want to speculate for ACM, I do know a lot
           | about the association space and their business models as I
           | have reported on this space for a decade. I would suggest
           | that in a situation like this, "paying for it" probably
           | refers to:
           | 
           | - Accounting for the loss in revenue from changing a service
           | that was once commercial (as this would be an example of a
           | loss of a "nondues revenue," something a lot of organizations
           | are actually trying to increase so as to cut back their
           | reliance on membership dues)
           | 
           | - Potential rights considerations (there are magazine
           | articles with photos in that archive, for example, and many
           | of those might have contracts/ownership considerations to
           | work through)
           | 
           | - The labor of actually managing the transition (with
           | something like this you wouldn't want to just run a script to
           | open it up, you probably would have to double-check things,
           | and there are simply a lot of things). They have to budget
           | for any employee work used to handle this transition.
           | 
           | They emphasized to me in our interview, however, that the
           | issue was not technical; I actually thought it might be given
           | the amount of content there is, but as they're quoted as
           | saying in the piece, the real work centered around the
           | creative decision-making around actually making a call like
           | this.
        
       | erk__ wrote:
       | This is great news, I have been rather annoyed in the past when I
       | wanted to share stuff that were on the archive publicly. The last
       | such example I can remember was Peter Naur's reasoning that it
       | should not be computer science, but Datalogy:
       | https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365719.366510
        
         | the-smug-one wrote:
         | In some languages it is datalogy :). For example Swedish:
         | https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datavetenskap
        
           | _delirium wrote:
           | Peter Naur was Danish, and was successful in getting the term
           | datalogy established in the Scandinavian languages. Although
           | in recent years most institutions have stopped using it in
           | English materials and adopted "computer science", I guess for
           | greater international visibility. For example, the department
           | Naur established at the University of Copenhagen, the
           | _Datalogisk Institut_ [1], is now branded as the Department
           | of Computer Science [2] in English. Whereas when Naur was
           | still running it, he called it the Datalogy Institute.
           | 
           | [1] https://di.ku.dk/
           | 
           | [2] https://di.ku.dk/english/
        
       | martyvis wrote:
       | Sadly I think this announce came around the time they
       | relationship that gave you access to O'Reilly library was torn
       | up. I suspect a lot of people won't be renewing ACM membership
       | just on economic grounds
        
       | asmbaty wrote:
       | What are some precious information in ACM.org that is not
       | possible to get another place? I mean in this age where
       | everything is so public. Or not? I used to have a 1 year free
       | access to all of ACM resources. This was a gift. But I did not to
       | anything. Maybe I lost an opportunity.
        
         | wolverine876 wrote:
         | I think you are overestimating how available high-quality
         | information. Low quality, misinformation, disinformation - that
         | is all widely available.
        
         | flowerbeater wrote:
         | What if you needed to link to a paper on your company's
         | website? You'd link to sci-hub?
        
         | bruce343434 wrote:
         | (edit: almost) everything can be found on sci hub.
        
           | grendelt wrote:
           | Not everything. A lot. But stuff published this year still
           | hasn't made its way there. And not all social sciences.
           | 
           | source: dissertating
           | 
           | (When I need something I can't get through my library,
           | #icanhazpdf, find on scihub, or other googley means; I just
           | email the author. Though that can take some time.)
        
           | kvathupo wrote:
           | In my experience, the only hole in shadow libraries is that
           | they lack scans of old papers on non-trendy subjects.
           | Interestingly, it seems the humanities don't have analogously
           | useful sites.
        
       | gzer0 wrote:
       | On a related subject, does anyone know of a simple technique to
       | download and save large quantities of all publicly available
       | research articles?
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | Write a scraping program with appropriate throttling to be nice
         | to providers with beautifulsoup on python. I have done this
         | fairly successfully.
        
         | ksr wrote:
         | Simple technique and large quantities are often not
         | compatible... Check out the work of Internet Archive Scholar at
         | https://scholar.archive.org. Their code is open source
         | https://github.com/internetarchive/fatcat-scholar
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | Since it is available for free online, why not just download
         | what you need? Their site has nice suggestions for related
         | works anyway -- managing a big heap o' papers seems like a
         | pain.
        
       | whiskeytuesday wrote:
       | RIP Oxide computer company. Cantrill's productivity is about to
       | go to zero for a while.
        
         | eatbitseveryday wrote:
         | > RIP Oxide computer company. Cantrill's productivity is about
         | to go to zero for a while.
         | 
         | What's the relation?
        
         | bcantrill wrote:
         | Ha -- I've actually been a Digital Library subscriber for a
         | long time due to my association with ACM Queue, and tried in
         | vain for years to get the ACM to do something like this. I
         | _did_ convince them years ago to let selected practitioner DL
         | subscribers  "unlock" interesting articles, which I promptly
         | did myself with one of my all-time favorite articles[0] -- but
         | ACM didn't publicize the program (or really even mention it?)
         | and to the best of my knowledge, that article was the only one
         | made available.
         | 
         | [0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/07/18/revisiting-the-
         | intel-...
        
       | pmayrgundter wrote:
       | Awesome! Thanks ACM!
        
       | ArtWomb wrote:
       | A lot of the digital libraries, open data sets & code
       | repositories suffer the same (quite hard) problem: a lack of
       | finding aids for humans. Just greet the user with the same
       | boolean advanced search fields. ACM, IEEE, NASA-ADS, Arxiv,
       | Genbank, etc. All are aware of open access and "researcher
       | development", but no one has a better solution than cloud based
       | capsule model ;)
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-12 23:01 UTC)