[HN Gopher] CACM Is Now Open Access
___________________________________________________________________
CACM Is Now Open Access
Author : transpute
Score : 312 points
Date : 2024-03-01 07:19 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cacm.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cacm.acm.org)
| hkgirjenk wrote:
| Is it because of ArXiv?
| stonogo wrote:
| arXiv is more than twenty years old at this point. I think the
| rising opposition to exploitative publishers has ratcheted up
| pressure on other institutions to switch to an open access
| model more than arXiv suddenly causing policy changes.
|
| In 2019 there was a big dustup when people thought Trump was
| going to issue an executive order requiring all federally-
| funded research to be open access. ACM as an organization
| signed a letter with a bunch of publishers opposing this idea.
| It's own membership (myself included) objected pretty
| strongly... and the next year ACM announced plans to move to
| open access. So, just maybe, they're actually listening to
| their members.
| kragen wrote:
| arxiv is thirty years old i think?
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Most likely not, at least not directly. CACM and arXiv do not
| in any way compete.
|
| However, arXiv has done a lot for open access publishing, so
| perhaps it wouldn't have happened (this early) had it not been
| for arXiv.
| raphman wrote:
| No. ACM has been on a slow path towards making everything Open
| Access for many years now - driven both by internal and
| external feedback. Given that the ACM Digital Library
| (individual and library subscriptions) has been subsidizing
| other ACM endeavors, that making stuff OA is not something you
| can take back later, and that the required article processing
| charges (APCs) cause other problems, they have been rather
| careful with the transition.
|
| They plan to make the entire digital library freely accessible
| by January 1, 2026.
|
| Here's a short article about timeline and implications:
| https://medium.com/sigchi/about-acm-open-cd544408559c
|
| EDIT: for anyone wondering why there need to be APCs at all,
| Jonathan Aldrich gives a glimpse into costs and benefits of
| 'traditional' publishers: https://medium.com/sigchi/what-
| benefits-do-traditional-publi...
| g-b-r wrote:
| The entite library?
|
| This is amazing, I hadn't been following recently!!!
| unsignedint wrote:
| I'm interested in understanding how the ACM is handling the
| transition to Open Access, particularly given that they offer
| a lifetime add-on to their life membership option. How are
| they addressing potential pushback from individuals who have
| already paid a significant amount to access the Digital
| Library? Are they considering making a portion of the Digital
| Library exclusive to paid subscribers even after the
| transition to Open Access?
| midko wrote:
| This is great news! As a long-time CACM subscriber, I highly
| recommend it! There's a lot of breadth across Computer Science
| topics and the in-depth articles in most issues are v good! I
| only wish I had more time for it..
| sitkack wrote:
| This is some of the most wonderful news I have heard in 2024.
|
| I have been complaining in probably a not to effectual way over
| the past 15 years about this. I'd like to think in some small
| part, I _helped_ in this endeavor, but I am no butterfly.
|
| It is intellectually honest, that everyone on earth should have
| access to this material. The garden is available to all.
|
| Thank you ACM!
| tempodox wrote:
| Fantastic news, I'm sure this will turn out to be a good
| decision.
| __rito__ wrote:
| I could not find a link from where I could access the said
| archive.
| TachyonicBytes wrote:
| They seem to have added "Download PDF" buttons to every issue
| at the usual link https://cacm.acm.org/issues. There's also the
| digital library https://dl.acm.org/
| g-b-r wrote:
| Yes there are small download buttons at
| https://cacm.acm.org/issues, from the library instead I think
| they're not (all) still accessible
| __rito__ wrote:
| Here's an issue with the said "Downloadload PDF" button:
| https://cacm.acm.org/issue/august-2023/. But, when I click
| it, it doesn't download anything. But opens a page of topic
| hierarchy (?).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| For some reason the download PDF option doesn't work
| reliably. Two ways to get to the actual PDF if it takes
| you to the wrong page:
|
| Slow way: Click archive, navigate to the issue, select
| PDF.
|
| Faster way: On the right hand side (desktop) there's a
| vertical bar with some buttons click the circled i, then
| "Issue's Table of Contents". Takes you to the issue's
| page and you can get the PDf.
| g-b-r wrote:
| THIS IS SO GREAT
|
| There are many seminal papers in the older issues, and it's only
| right that they finally, again, be accessible for everyone!!!
|
| As an aside, I encourage everyone learning or at least struggling
| with a new subject to check its first papers, they often clarify
| it better than anything else (and are usually less complex than
| you'd expect)
| Someone wrote:
| > There are many seminal papers in the older issues, and it's
| only right that they finally, again, be accessible for
| everyone!!!
|
| Papers from before 2000 have been freely available since May
| 2022 (https://associationsnow.com/2022/07/the-way-things-were-
| why-..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31447465)
| asymmetric wrote:
| Pretty brave of them to do this in a time where everyone is
| instead trying to sell their silos to AI companies.
| criddell wrote:
| For people familiar with this resource, do you have a top three
| list of articles to start with?
|
| It would also be cool to hear from HNers who have papers on
| there. I'm adding this just in case you aren't comfortable
| including yourself on a top three list.
| nusuth31416 wrote:
| I really enjoyed reading Programming Pearls by John Bentley
| many years ago. (Not working in IT sadly)
| criddell wrote:
| I had no idea that's where Programming Pearls came from. I
| bought both books years ago (along with Dewdney's _Tinkertoy
| Computer_ ) and really enjoyed them. I need to dig them out
| for a re-read.
| sitkack wrote:
| I really enjoyed Dewdney's "New Turing Omnibus", it is a
| collection of problems that can be solved computationally.
| It is a great gift for anyone wanting to solve problems
| with computers and new to computer science.
|
| https://archive.org/details/newturingomnibus0000dewd_q3p6
| jlas wrote:
| Sort by citations (https://dl.acm.org/action/doSearch?SeriesKey
| =cacm&sortBy=cit...) to see the most seminal ones.
| criddell wrote:
| Great idea.
|
| I did that and found a paper I would rank highly: Hoare's "An
| axiomatic basis for computer programming"[1].
|
| I clicked through and saw that it was included in their 25th
| anniversary issue and that particular issue seems like an
| excellent place to start.[2]
|
| [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/357980.358001
|
| [2]: https://dl.acm.org/toc/cacm/1983/26/1
| lambdaone wrote:
| This is wonderful. Kudos to the ACM for making this happen, and
| being on the right side of history.
| 4ad wrote:
| Every ACM paper can be found for free either on Arxiv, the
| author's webpage, or in very rare cases SciHub. People pay for
| ACM membership because they want to, not because they are forced
| to. It's a great organization to be a part of. You can even
| participate in ACM conferences without being a member!
|
| Making it open access makes perfect sense and can only increase
| scientific engagement and distribution.
| elric wrote:
| > People pay for ACM membership because they want to, not
| because they are forced to.
|
| I used to pay for membership because I enjoyed perusing the
| print edition of CACM. I loved the opportunities for
| serenditipy that it created merely by being on my coffee table.
| The digital edition doesn't have that. It requires conscious
| effort to go check out the website.
| jasonhong wrote:
| (I write occasional blog posts for CACM and am also on the
| editorial board)
|
| If you have ideas for how to improve CACM, the editor-in-
| chief (Jim Larus) is highly receptive. He's interested in
| increasing the value of CACM for industry professionals,
| researchers, and students, and in increasing membership in
| ACM.
|
| For example, one idea I've shared with him is to make CACM
| the main gateway for all of ACM content. You'll note that the
| new CACM has an "Explore Topics" menu at the top, which lists
| areas like Architecture, HCI, Security and Privacy. My
| suggestion was to make this a feed for all relevant ACM
| content, including SIG newsletters that ACM already
| publishes, paper award winners, recent journal articles, blog
| posts, etc.
|
| Perhaps it might be useful to get feedback by asking some
| questions. If you are a member of ACM, what do you find most
| valuable about it? And if you aren't a member, given that
| you're on HN and likely interested in a lot of content and
| conferences that ACM offers, why not? What could ACM do
| differently or what could it offer that would make membership
| valuable to you?
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Every _recent_ and /or _popular_ and /or _lucky_ paper can be
| found "for free" easily. With complete access, CACM ceases to
| be a blind spot of scientific literature.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Only new ones. ACM's paper archives are still useful for
| looking into the past. Often if the paper isn't that popular,
| they are the only source. However, this announcement is just
| about the CACM, still useful, but it isn't opening up the
| archive.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > it isn't opening up the archive.
|
| They are, though. This announcement is about CACM becoming
| fully open access, but it's also a bit of a "progress report"
| on opening up the archive.
|
| >> By the end of 2023, approximately 40% of the ~26,000
| articles ACM publishes annually were being published Open
| Access utilizing the ACM Open model. As ACM has progressed
| toward this goal, it has increasingly opened large parts of
| the ACM Digital Library, including more than 100,000 articles
| published between 1951-2000. It is ACM's plan to open its
| entire archive of over 600,000 articles when the transition
| to full Open Access is complete.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I thought they weren't opening it up until 2026? Anything
| published now worth reading is open access, or can easily
| be retrieved by googling from somewhere else, so that isn't
| much of a concern.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That's the deadline, yes. They've been opening up the
| archives (and new publications) along the way.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Heh... I cancelled my membership once Moshe said CACM will never
| be open. It's been ages since then.
| raphman wrote:
| Oh, where did he say this?
|
| IIRC, he always said that any OA model for ACM requires careful
| thinking about a sustainable business model.
|
| In 2009 he argued [1]:
|
| > "Indeed, the idea of unfettered access to scientific
| knowledge naturally resonates with many researchers, including
| me. So why doesn't ACM become an open-access publisher? [...]
| ACM operates as a democratic association. If you believe that
| ACM should change its publishing business model, then you
| should lobby for this position. [...] The second issue is the
| business model of association publishing, for example, "reader
| pays" vs. "authors pays." This is a legitimate topic of
| discussion, as long as we understand that it cannot be
| separated from the overall business model of the association.
| Just remember, "free" is not a sound business model."
|
| In 2018 he wrote [2]:
|
| > "If we are serious about open access, then we must discuss
| its underlying business model. Let's get serious about open
| access!"
|
| [1] https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/open-closed-or-clopen-access/
|
| [2] https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/open-access-and-acm/
| the_panopticon wrote:
| I wonder if other organizations like IEEE and its
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ are next?
| penguin_booze wrote:
| RSS feed is at https://cacm.acm.org/feed/.
| kragen wrote:
| this is great news
|
| is there a simple answer to 'what's the license'? i'd like to
| understand:
|
| - how effectively libraries' rights to archive, copy, and
| redistribute works published in cacm is protected;
|
| - whether the license is compatible with incorporation of text
| into wikipedia and stack overflow; and
|
| - to what extent volunteer translations into languages such as
| chinese and spanish can be legally archived, copied, and
| redistributed
|
| as i understand the term 'open access'
| (https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration) the answer should
| be 'irrevocably', 'not necessarily', and 'completely', but i'd
| like confirmation that the acm isn't using 'open access' in an
| incompatible way. the berlin declaration specifies
|
| > _The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions
| grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of
| access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and
| display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative
| works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject
| to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will
| continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper
| attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do
| now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed
| copies for their personal use._
|
| i mean i see https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-
| access/acmopen#model but i'm not seeing answers to those
| questions in it; it's more about how acm gets paid than about
| what licenses are being granted to the public
| raphman wrote:
| IIUC, it's complicated.
|
| For new OA publications at conferences/journals, authors get a
| choice of CC licenses [1,2]. The respective licenses can be
| found in an article's [3] "Information" sidebar (hidden by
| default) or the HTML/PDF version [4]. Unfortunately, the
| licenses are apparently not shown more prominently in the ACM
| Digital Library. The search function does not allow filtering
| by license either.
|
| For CACM articles, the traditional ACM copyright notice seems
| to apply [5] (maybe there are CC-licensed articles, but I did
| not see any so far):
|
| "Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of
| this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee
| provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or
| commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the
| full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party
| components of this work must be honored. For all other uses,
| contact the Owner/Author."
|
| For pre-OA publications (< ~2020 ?), authors could either
| transfer copyright or give ACM a publishing license [3]. I'd
| assume that ACM may assign an arbitrary CC license to
| publications to which they own the copyright but not to ones
| for which they only have publishing rights. Given that authors
| only licensed publishing rights for the final article to ACM,
| I'd guess the only acceptable CC license in this case would be
| CC-BY-ND.
|
| However, I guess that ACM won't want to go through the trouble
| of assigning CC licenses to older publications.
|
| EDIT:
|
| My tentative guesses/answers to your questions would be:
|
| > - how effectively libraries' rights to archive, copy, and
| redistribute works published in cacm is protected;
|
| IIRC, libraries subscribing to ACM's DL already have the right
| to archive the content. Given that many authors have only given
| ACM the right to distribute their works, I'm not sure whether
| scraping OA articles is allowed. (ACM has been banning IP
| ranges for mass-downloading papers in the past, so be careful.)
|
| > - whether the license is compatible with incorporation of
| text into wikipedia and stack overflow; and
|
| IMHO, only if a non-ND CC license was applied to the article.
| Also, correct attribution is still needed [7].
|
| > - to what extent volunteer translations into languages such
| as chinese and spanish can be legally archived, copied, and
| redistributed
|
| Again, probably only for explicitly CC-licensed content
| (excluding -ND).
|
| [1] https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/publication-
| rights...
|
| [2] https://cfiesler.medium.com/acm-copyright-licenses-which-
| sho...
|
| [3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623509.3633366
|
| [4] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3623509.3633366
|
| [5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624717 (sidebar)
|
| [6] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14734/which-
| acm...
|
| [7]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Creative_Commons_text...
| kragen wrote:
| thanks, this is great information! it's good to see that in
| the "information" sidebar (visible by clicking the circled i
| icon at the top of the right toolbar) they've removed the
| language about redistributing to lists or posting on servers.
| but "commercial advantage", especially now that they've
| removed "direct", seems like it could pose a lot of risks
|
| in the united states today, universities can no longer take
| advantage of the research exemption
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption to patents
| because madey v. duke held that, by using madey's patented
| invention for research purposes, duke was 'increas[ing] the
| status of the institution and lur[ing] lucrative research
| grants', so a sneaky lawyer hired by a hypothetical future
| cacm administration could argue that things like archiving
| the cacm articles in a university library could produce
| 'commercial advantage' for the university, so it would be
| nice to have the acm using language that protects users'
| rights more solidly
|
| also, i feel like having the notice hidden by default makes
| it unnecessarily difficult to comply with, since the notice
| requires that copies 'bear this notice (...) on the first
| page'. unlike older cacm publications, the pdf of that
| article produced by the acm also doesn't bear the notice on
| the first page, or in fact anywhere, so you have to modify
| the pdf to be able to copy it in compliance with the
| conditions of the notice
|
| cc-by-nd or similar licenses are clearly not compliant with
| the definition of 'open access' in the berlin declaration.
| you may be correct that acm doesn't have the legal ability to
| license the creation of derivative works of older articles
| unless the author or other copyright holder had transferred
| copyright to the acm. that would make those older articles
| not open access, and obtaining the necessary licenses might
| be logistically infeasible at this point by any measure short
| of drastically reducing the term of copyright through
| legislation
|
| so it seems like the acm is improving the situation
| considerably, but there's still a long way to go
| raphman wrote:
| Thanks for the information!
|
| AFAIK, licensing agreements between libraries and digital
| publishers typically include a right to perpetual access to
| articles in a journal or digital library they subscribe to.
| Any papers published while the licensing agreement is in
| place are to be made available even if the library cancels
| their subscription. This also includes the right to make
| backup copies of the digital library.
|
| (Here's such an agreement between ACM and the Norwegian
| universities:
| https://www.openscience.no/media/3449/download?inline )
|
| What the library is allowed to do with this backup probably
| depends on country-specific laws.
|
| However, if I understand the current situation correctly,
| ACM allows everyone to download CACM articles but not to
| redistribute them, right?
|
| In theory, they could also explicitly allow anyone to
| redistribute all of their publications (they reserve the
| right to do this in the licensing agreement with authors).
| However, I'd argue that it is not in ACMs interest to do so
| - and probably not in mine, either. Having a central,
| trustworthy source has benefits - e.g. when retracting
| papers. I'm fine with the ACM DL being free to use and
| having library backups as safety nets if ACM ever goes
| under.
| kragen wrote:
| it's definitely in acm's interest to do so if they want
| to claim they're 'open access', and it's in your interest
| too
|
| i agree that it's beneficial to have a central,
| trustworthy source. if redistributing cacm articles is
| clearly legal, and the acm goes under, you'll get them
| from the internet archive, wikisource, project gutenberg,
| google's new historical acm article archive, or some
| similar institution. if redistributing cacm articles is
| _not_ clearly legal, you 'll have to get them from
| library genesis, sci-hub, or the pirate bay, with the
| associated risks of incorrect contents--but only until
| those get shut down following a change of government
|
| well, maybe _you personally_ won 't, because you have a
| position at a university, and you can easily just use its
| library. but the people you'd like to have as your
| students 20 years from now, people who are now living
| here in argentina or in ukraine or egypt, will have to
| get them from there
|
| an additional issue is that, in many cases, the 'central
| trustworthy source' does a really bad job of scanning
| paper documents: they use bilevel scanning for
| photographs (sometimes even color photographs), scan at
| very low resolution, chop off the pages, and so forth. i
| run into these constantly; https://www.nasa.gov/history/a
| lsj/a17/A17_LunarRover2.html is probably the most recent
| example. although allowing other people to scan their
| copies and distribute the scans does not ensure that they
| will correct this problem, _prohibiting_ them from doing
| so reduces the chances further
|
| analogous remarks apply to translation
|
| and that's why the berlin declaration enshrines the right
| for readers to redistribute works and derivative works as
| central to open access
| raphman wrote:
| Good points, thanks!
| shrubble wrote:
| When I was studying up on APL I found that a huge amount of
| references were not available, so it is very nice to see now that
| a search done today returns so many results. Same for Snobol...
| hintymad wrote:
| I was a subscriber of CACM for many years, but didn't renew my
| subscription this year because CACM had more and more content on
| social issues. The equity of this, the privacy of that. I find
| such contents incredibly boring and really hope that they focus
| more on researches.
|
| P.S., I was going to show some examples, but the latest issue of
| CACM does have more research-related articles than my impression
| with the past issues, so I could be wrong....
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| About effing time.
|
| And thank you Alexandra Elbakyan because I'm sure you were a
| factor in this decision even if ACM won't admit it.
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