(disclosure, I'm an ACM member, and a IEEE/Usenix/SAGE/LOPSA member as well)
Professional organizations have trouble with their revenue models.
The journal publishing business that the ACM and IEEE are in isn't sustainable long term, and drives people away or causes perverse benefit schemes, similar to how newspaper's business models fell apart in the last 10 years.
A better method would be to focus on conferences and community, which is more of the way that Usenix and LOPSA work.
That said, there's some solid stuff in the ACM journals, and their membership fees aren't all that crazy.
I can't wait until the dead tree editions of their publications go away.
I'm going to disagree - I love having the dead tree edition. I'm also a member (granted, at a student rate), but love having a physical copy of something to read when I don't feel like pulling out my laptop just to read some articles. Plus typically, if I pull out my laptop, I have work that needs to be done.
Students are given the option of buying the print magazine though - I think they just need to extend this policy to everyone, rather than making it a print or nothing affair.
> I love having the dead tree edition. I'm ... a student
The novelty of getting science in the mail will fade. I am now completely addicted to Mendeley: I have it on my ipad, iphone, mac, and windows box at work.
The problem with dead trees is retrieving that article you read 7 years ago becomes a real bear. What journal was it in? Something about venules and tylenol .... crap. Mendeley is like having Gmail for your journal articles. Even the highlighting and notes are in the cloud. Love it.
And now you know someone who does read his monthly copy of CACM from cover to cover. And I pay extra for it (again, student pricing doesn't include physical copies -- something I think they should extend to professional members).
So are you suggesting that I should have to print it out because people shouldn't be forced to pay for it? Or because I'm using some dead trees? Because if it's the second, there about a million more useful places you could recommend people cut down consumption, than on my monthly magazine with about 100 pages, that, again, I pay for.
CACM always seemed like a waste. In the 80s every other issue seemed to be full of "women in computing" and "minorities in computing," and while that's a worthy cause, I got mighty sick of it.
Most of the CACM articles were technically weak or about subjects I had no interest in. I would have been happy to not receive it (better, get some other SIG newsletter instead).
In the era of digital distribution, I just print out the stuff I want on dead trees and leave the rest as bits.
CACM was reformed a couple of years ago. In one issue, it became vastly better and it has sustained its quality since that time pretty well. There are always two journal articles with nice introductions for those of us who don't follow their respective fields regularly.
The rest of the articles tend to be pretty solid too; there's very little IT drivel or academic navel-gazing left. It probably doesn't hurt to have some awareness of what's going on in academia even for those of us who work in industry anyway.
Not that any of this really refutes your main point that digital distribution is inherently more personalizable.
I think you're talking about different things-- there's the monthly CACM magazine, and then there are the huge books of conference proceedings and journals.
Perhaps. I'll agree that the huge conference books are pretty useless (though I can see why university libraries want them), and not something I'd ever purchase. Those papers I _do_ print out. But I did specify monthly magazine in my original comment.
1. CACM is more of a magazine than a journal or conference proceeding.
2. You aren't paying for all the externalities associated with your choices, so I wouldn't be so sure you are truly paying for your 100 odd pages. Maybe you could look into a KindleDX or something similar for your mobile reading pleasure?
Transfer of copyright ownership sounds harsh. It should at least be copyright sharing. There must be some huge benefit involved for people to transfer their ownership.
Unfortunately, transfer of copyright seems more the norm than the exception in the world of journals. The open access movement seems to have eroded this somewhat.
In an academia of "publish&perish" the benefit of transferring your copyright is that you get published and add another point to your tenure-track bonus list.
So, some disclaimers: I sit on the ACM's Professions Board, and am a member of the CACM Editorial Board, where I sit on the board for the Practice section of CACM, also known as ACM Queue. That said, I speak only for myself here, not for ACM or the Professions Board or Queue Board.
Disclaimers dispensed with, let me say that I personally sympathize with the complaints, especially with respect to the practitioner. The Digital Library (DL) is, in a word, overpriced with respect to the practitioner, and I believe that the ACM can both increase its membership base and better (and more broadly) monetize the DL by using it as more of a loss-leader with the practitioner. The good news is that the ACM is quite receptive to this at its highest levels, and I believe that the chances for reform (at least with respect to the practitioner) are very good.
And indeed, this is the good news about ACM more broadly: the organization wants to change, especially with respect to the practitioner. One would be right to question this, but trust that I came to this conclusion only reluctantly and in the presence of overwhelming evidence -- a path that I outlined here:
I would repeat here my plea from that blog entry: the ACM has given practitioners a new voice, but we must engage with the ACM to use it. We must move beyond merely "considering the ACM harmful" and point to new models that work for our profession and its society. In short, the ACM is willing to follow, but we practitioners must light the way!
I was an ACM student member. I joined because of the clunkiness of accessing the DL through my university.
Well I was tricked. I don't care about the social stuff. I don't care about the conferences. All I wanted was access to the DL, your single most useful asset.
I didn't get that because it's not bundled. My fault for not reading the fine print. And the ACM's fault for treating one of the two core bodies of comp. sci. literature as a luxury item.
My university's chapter of ACM just puts on silly social events and sponsors talks that are high on marketing and low on tech. Anyone who really cares about the field has given up trying to deal with them and just made their own clubs.
I realize that this is a problem with the local chapter more than ACM as a whole, but the message they've repeatedly given to me is that ACM has nothing of value to offer me.
Were it only that simple! No, "engaging with the ACM" means becoming involved via either local chapters or with the national organization -- and it starts with becoming a member. If you're curious about other ways to get involved, I'm happy to offer ideas -- I can be reached at my HN user name at (naturally) acm.org.
Oh, the number of times I've bouced off ACM's paywall. It's maddening to see an article that you think will let you make progress in a problem you're working on, but unable to access it because of the $15 fee.
And paying the membership fees is not a solution, either — if you are an ACM member, you probably still need access to IEEE body of publications, and then there is Elsevier/Springer/others…
"It's maddening to see an article that you think will let you make progress in a problem you're working on, but unable to access it because of the $15 fee..."
Enough progress to justify spending $15 (less than the price of dinner downtown)? I agree, many find the revenue models / cost structures of professional organizations outmoded. However, I find this rather harsh aversion to paying a few bucks for peer-reviewed, scientific content curious.
If it's of any help to you, many public universities, schools, and local libraries provide full access to ACM content, often both on-site and off. The most common method of providing access to this is via EBSCO's "Business Source Premier" database. I frequently read ACM articles from my desk via the web; a quick title search in EBSCO will pull up the title in about 20 seconds, and I can download a PDF of about any article published since 1965 to send to coworkers.
That said, if price is an issue, please check with your local library. Odds are good that your tax dollars are already paying the cost for you to read these articles from the comfort of your home or office. This isn't just true for the ACM -- even in the age of paywalls, your library's probably been quietly working to provide digital access to all of this for the past decade.
You mean, check with my local library here in Poland, right?
Don't place me in the "doesn't want to pay for content" box. I am OK with paying for content and I do pay for many things online. But there are two issues with ACM:
1. The research has been paid for with taxpayers' dollars (I wasn't the taxpayer, but still).
2. $15 is really expensive.
And of course, if it were just one article that would advance my work a lot, I'd gladly pay. But you don't know that ahead of time. And if you're building startups, you usually do a lot of wide-area research, so it isn't that one article, it's hundreds of articles that you need to skim through.
I also don't buy the argument that we need to pay so much just so that we get peer-reviewed content. JMLR (Journal of Machine-Learning Research) is a prime example that this need not be the case.
You can put me in the "doesn't want to pay for content" box when it comes to science. Science, including computer science works best when new discoveries are spread far and wide free of charge. Journals make their money by securing publication rights in exchange for deciding that something is important enough. Once, it was difficult to publish information to a wide audience, but in the web age, journals seem like a bit of a scam to me.
The curation job still needs paying for, but I think it's pretty clear that the ACM and others have strayed from that to trying to squeeze the long tail for as much money as they can can get.
Besides, does peer-review cost anything for them? The one time I was asked by an ACM journal to review a paper for them, there was no monetary exchange involved.
Yes, or the library of the nearest university will be likely to grant you access for a small fee even if you are not a student there, plus you will also get access to their books.
Problem is, most papers aren't that good or are not relevant to what you're doing, but it's usually hard to tell based on the abstract. When I do research in a subject, I find ~10 papers out of which I'll read (parts of) maybe one. If I were to buy each of them for $15, I'd end up paying $150, and only get a few pages of read useful material out of it.
Exactly, without a strong reference from someone you trust who also knows the subject, you have no idea if the article is worth $15. And then you could probably just make a copy of their copy.
There is no way you can know if the content of the article will actually be useful - there goes $15 down the drain. if my local library has ACM access, yay... but it doesn't. So they get content for free from academics, sell it at a profit, while the academics get nothing for their work and have their content limited to an audience that might not be the one they actually want to reach - it could be, but they've just signed away their content for nothing and have no control on who can can see it, not even they can see it... Some academics publish just because they have to, so ACM is fine for them, but a lot are not like that, and ACM is taking advantage of the situation.
The only reason I would pay for content is to give back to the author for taking the time to commit to paper the information that was useful to me. Paying to some organization that's taking advantage of people for profit... no, thank you.
If you know the article you want to read and immediacy isn't a concern you can probably look the authors up and send them an email. Many would be happy to send you a pdf.
I've frequently Googled paper names from ACM and found that the author has put them on their own site as direct downloads. So, yes, I definitely second you but.. check their site first before you e-mail them too ;-)
It depends on the article. Yes, there are some articles I would gladly pay $15 for (like Boneh/Shaw's work on collusion secure fingerprinting). However, in a lot of cases, I'm going to read a paper for its citations. If I have to pay $15 for that paper, and then pay over and over again for each additional paper that I want, the costs quickly become unsustainable.
Though, as the replies to my question (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2133193) point out, many times you can get a paper that you need by contacting one of the authors, so it the payment isn't as big of an issue as it could be.
If someone publishes via ACM, IEEE, or one of the other places papers go to die, it just ensures that their work will be unread, unused, and more or less ignored.
Which is sad, because the individuals publish there in order to move up through the academic ranks. By moving forward in their careers, they are also marginalizing their own work.
The incentives are perverse, and it will be a very happy day when all CS content is freely available online, as it should be.
This is not exactly true. Universities subscribe en masse to these things for presumably exorbitant fees, but the result is that everybody in the university has access and doesn't notice the evil in these institutions, and continues to publish in them. So what it ensures is that your work will be ignored by everyone outside the ivory tower, which is arguably worse, since it gives the impression that your work is important, when anybody who might actually do anything useful with it is screwed.
Probably the one vector that work does have from the ivory tower to the real world is via people, when they transfer from one to the other, or have one foot in each side, and can transfer ideas and PDFs from the ivory tower to the real world, and can transfer motivations for new ideas from the real world to the ivory tower. Bridge-people like these are some of the most admirable people in academia, in my opinion, and also in my opinion produce by far the best papers.
(I am therefore trying to be one of them, sort of, although I'm not really interested in actually writing papers, since to get it published (and therefore have it count officially as a 'paper' instead of a PDF talking about what you did) you have to write a variable amount of obfuscatory bullshit.)
It's not their obligation to track down cheaper or free sources. That's silly. After all, the ACM isn't going to waste time keeping track of the various sources of every paper they publish. It's not their job.
If someone is motivated by the fee to find another source, they'll do so. Maybe they'll ask their colleagues. Maybe they'll search the web. Maybe they'll take the time to visit a university library and track down a print copy.
But if they don't care about the price, they'll just do the easiest thing and pay the ACM in order to save time.
It's not the ACM's job to do the legwork. If you want to save the money, you have to do the work yourself.
Who do you think should pay for the servers, maintenance & upkeep of the ACM site? It's a non-profit organization supported (barely in some years) by membership dues.
I have access to probably everything you want through a university VPN; if you really want a given paper, email me a link to it and I'll email back the PDF. I can't scale this solution, but I figure I'll do what I can.
As I said in a comment yesterday, go to the author's web site or to his/her university/lab/corp. There is usually a prepublication or slightly different version.
The ACM won't stop spamming me. "Your invitation to become a member", they say. Following the unsubscribe instructions doesn't work. Blocking the sending address doesn't work (they keep changing it). I've resorted to blacklisting *@acm.org.
Personally, I'm bothered that the ACM is an organization for academic researchers and doesn't seem to give a damn about practitioners in the field.
I quit my ACM membership when I got sick of continuous hand-wringing editorials asking "Why don't women want to study CS?" and "Why don't undergraduates want to study CS?"
The ACM never seriously considers that undergrads who might study CS might know people who've chosen computing in a career and discovered that they hit a big glass ceiling in their 30's.
If the ACM started to ask the question of "What happens to CS graduates?" and thinking about career paths in the profession, they might find that the answers for the problems that keep them up at night might come naturally.
Wow, the last one on that page is actually a recognized "Dark Pattern"¹:
ACM used to routinely request certain kinds of "volunteered" contributions
and/or subscriptions on my annual invoicing. They would do this by adding
the things they wanted me to do (without my requesting it) and make me
have to line out the items I didn't want.
If anyone has a copy of such an invoice (I've always thought "societies" were silly, never joined ACM when I was in grad school, and refused to join NHS on principle) they should throw a copy up on the Dark Patterns wiki.
Do you really think that the term "dark pattern" has anything at all to do with race? Protip: associating everything with races is how racism continues; stop thinking about things in terms of races in general, and the world will be a far better place.
Protip: ignoring examples of terms with unintentionally racist overtones and telling people not to bring it is often a characteristic of somebody with unexamined privilege and lack of understanding of racism.
If you don't want people to think of you that way, avoid doing it. And when somebody else does, don't upvote them.
EDIT: downvoted. What a surprise. People here sure don't like getting called on their privilege.
Ooh, Dark Pattern, that sounds awesome. Also, Dark = relative absence of light, or almost absence of light, but not quite. Also, in western philosophy and languages, Dark is equated to evil, as opposed to Light and non-evilness, that can be traced as far as the allegory of the cave, where shadows are illusions and reality is "above", "the light" that creates "the shadows".
If the word "Dark" invokes a racist meaning for you, you might want to consider retraining yourself in language and philosophy, you're on the fast track to becoming racist - racist being someone who connects meanings of human discrimination based on physical traits to any word (that could relate to color, light, whatever) regardless of the context and original meaning of said words. You're discriminating those poor harmless words!
If the word "Dark" invokes a racist meaning for somebody else, you might consider trying to understand why rather than attacking them. It's quite possible that ''you'' are the one who's on a fast track to being racist.
I agree we should stamp out racial prejudice everywhere it appears, like that well-known racist Mel Brooks and his Canadian caricature, Dark Helmet. Neo-colonialist interpretation: inside every big black man is a whiny white man who can't breathe in this thing.
And let's not forget that closet bigot JK Rowling. Did you know the Dark Lord is really black? The movies got it all wrong.
Or the League of Shadows in Batman Begins... it was called League of Assassins in the comic books, so we can blame the interpolating hand of director Christopher Nolan...
I presented at CUFP '10 a while back, which is associated with the ACM. Even though I was a speaker, they charged me full ticket price to get into the conference.
When I balked at paying to speak, the representative replied:
"Well, it's either buy a ticket or wait outside until right before your presentation, and then leave the room immediately after it."
To cap it all off, the video of my presentation is now behind the members-only paywall. (http://bit.ly/fGjAaJ)
At most CS conferences (save some of the biggies like SigGraph, SuperComputing), at least half of the attendees are the presenters or co-authors. Those ticket prices are intended for you. It's not an accidental oversight. Their funding for the conference takes into account the speakers paying.
Out of the 10 conferences I spoke at in 2010, they were the only conference who made speakers pay. Also, many of the conferences I attended covered the ticket price and subsidized part of the lodging and transportation for speakers.
That said, all of the conferences I attended were very similar in size, sponsorship, subject matter, audience, and price, so this may just be a result of which conferences I attend. (In which case, I count myself as fortunate to find generous organizers.)
That's completely bizarre. Hats of to you for speaking anyway, I would have been on the next available means of transportation back to my point of origin. Not that I'd ever be invited to speak at an ACM conference ;)
The author's problem is with the academic publishing industry (which all pretty much operates in the same manner), not the ACM.
Because academic publishing is deeply intertwined with the process whereby professors are awarded promotions and tenure, there is very little impetus for reform here. It will take a generation or more for this problem to go away.
Fortunately (at least for me), biomedical research these days is largely an exception to this. Thanks to a Bush-era appropriations bill, anyone who takes NIH funding must ensure that their articles are published open-access on PubMedCentral within 12 months of the initial publication. It's not perfect, but it does at least solve the problem with old publications getting locked behind paywalls unreasonable to the value. We also have the PLoS series of journals, which are completely open access and Creative Commons "attribution" licensed.
Agreed. This problem isn't ACM's fault. Professional societies are too dependent upon journal publishers to force significant change. It is Congress that needs to step in and demand that all journal articles produced as a result of any federally-funded research project (not just NIH-funded ones) be subject to the 1 year post-publication open access rule. If Congress does that, then the journals have no choice but to comply or else the authors who supply the content will publish elsewhere.
From what I can say regarding CS conferences, ACM just rubberstamps and pockets the money.
At one recent conference, the organizer addressed the concerns about high fees saying something like "well, most of it went to ACM, so we may hypothetically save on that, but we understand that the bulk of participants come from academia and they need the proceedings".
Meanwhile, the "proceedings" are purely virtual, the same PDFs we submitted put online at ACM Digital Library.
Bloodsuckers.
Journals are priced for institutional libraries. They still don't know how to address the non-affiliated scholar market.
While the industry evolves its business model we need to get stuff done. Here's a workaround: use Google Scholar.
Look for the link that says "All X versions". Find the free pdf pre-print, usually from on the author's home page. Works at least 80% of the time for me. The OP is right though, this doesn't work so well for older pre-interwebs articles.
I agree. I hope that more journals adopt the JMLR model. The university system is already paying for all the editors we need. No need to pay twice now that distribution costs are near zero.
Their 990, a form nonprofits have to file with the IRS. You can find them at guidestar.org. You can also walk into any nonprofit and request a copy of their most recent 990 no questions asked (well, no questions answered anyway).
The most important reason why the ACM's publishing model (and academic publishing generally) doesn't just dry up and blow away is that people on academic career tracks are judged by their publication record --- meaning publication in prestigious journals; putting the same text on a web site someplace doesn't count. So, if an academic doesn't let the ACM (or Elsevier, or someone else equally grabby) take control of their writing about their work, they effectively sacrifice a valuable career chit.
Unfortunately, less expensive alternatives are going to be hard to bootstrap: a new, no-name journal almost by definition hasn't had the chance to establish prestige by publishing papers which go on to get widely cited. And if the idea is to do the same job while sucking less money out of people, that leaves very little cash for promotion, or to compensate "big names" that might lend credibility to the project...
Unfortunately, less expensive alternatives are going to be hard to bootstrap: a new, no-name journal almost by definition hasn't had the chance to establish prestige by publishing papers which go on to get widely cited.
Well, it depends. If (and I admit that this is a huge if) you can get a couple of really big names to start publishing stuff in your new journal, you can bootstrap a journal pretty quickly. However, for this to happen, the big names that you're dealing have to be really, really disgusted with their current journal.
Not just with their current journal (the big shots usually have a choice of venues), but with academic publishing in general. But of course, what makes someone a "big name" in academia is that they've succeeded well in the system as it is, and aren't likely to be deeply aggrieved with it.
"The ACM, in common with other organizers, requires those who have papers published in its journals and conferences to sign over the copyright to them. This means that you can’t republish a paper elsewhere and that the ACM can charge for your writing without paying you any fee."
Really? So every CS researcher who posts their publications on their personal site is flagrantly violating ACM's copyright with no consequences? I don't see how this can be accurate.
Publication is only a part of the broader goal of disseminating ideas and results. Authors can expect ACM to contribute to this wider goal, and in particular to encourage dissemination in multiple forums. ACM expects authors to acknowledge ACM's contribution and not to publish the same material in other venues, except as permitted by ACM copyright policy.
Thus authors can expect ACM to:
* Allow a submission to be posted on home pages and public repositories before and after review
* Allow an authors' version of their own ACM-copyrighted work on their personal server or on servers belonging to their employers
* Allow metadata information, e.g., bibliographic, abstract, and keywords, for their individual work to be openly available
* Allow authors the right to reuse their figures in their own subsequent publications for which they have granted ACM copyright
* Provide statistics for each journal, transaction, and newsletter on its average turn-around time and its current backlog of articles.
And ACM expects authors to
* Appropriately acknowledge the publisher's effort
* Ensure that whenever the authors or their employers provide a link to a personal copy that there is a link to the ACM definitive version
* Ensure that all versions copyrighted by ACM bear the ACM copyright.
This would qualify as "green" open access ("gold" open access being provided directly by the journal). So you can blame authors for not posting their papers online if you feel so inclined.
ACM provides a clause which lets you upload pre-print versions of your work. In Computer Science, where its almost guaranteed the academic did the typesetting anyway, the pre-print and the actual camera-ready version is identical.
I was working for a university Computer Science department, and trying to build a paper repository. The library, which took copyright very seriously, was adamant that we couldn't store copies of the papers, and that the academics couldn't either on their own sites. The academics were very angry at this, and I got in the middle of a pretty vicious crossfire. It was the worst time I ever had at that job.
ACM doesn't police it. They don't want people setting up rival repositories, that's all. However, Citeseer seems to be skating on very thin ice, and Google Scholar has made it much easier to find those "pre-prints". I see ACM not as a professional organization but a conference organizer/authenticator. Their magazine is also pretty good too.
I don't think it is. The following is from the ACM's copyright assignment form [1]:
Each of the Employer/Author(s) retains the following rights ... The right to post author-prepared versions of the Work covered by the ACM copyright in a personal collection on
their own home page, on a publicly accessible server of their employer and in a repository legally mandated by the
agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and
personal use by others, and must include the following notice both embedded within the full text file and in the
accompanying citation display as well ...
In my area of CS at least, people nearly always hosted their own papers. Finding a free copy of a paper was never a problem -- it was just a matter of entering the paper's title in scholar.google.com, and clicking the first "edu" link that came up, instead of IEEE or ACM. This was faster to do than spending the 15 s switching on the VPN connection to the campus network.
I suppose students / professors hosting their own papers might have been unique to the area of CS I was studying...
The ACM grants back " The right to post author-prepared versions of the Work covered by the ACM copyright in a
personal collection on their own home page, on a publicly accessible server of their employer and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include the
following notice both embedded within the full text file and in the accompanying citation display as well: ..."
It doesn't seem fair. They charge a fee for others to read your article, but your rights to the same (your) article are limited to free access and only under limited circumstances.
You can generally post a user-generated version of your article for personal use on your personal server, not their typeset version. That usually means putting up the version that you submitted (in the generic Latex template), rather than the final version.
For every ACM conference I've seen that's the same version, though; they just print the PDF I personally prepare and submit to them, with no editing except maybe a script that slaps a header or footer onto it.
Whenever I see the paywall come up when browsing the internet, I get the sick feeling I've been redirected to some Ponzi Scheme. Charging $15 for a 10 year old paper can be thought of nothing other than ridiculous.
The 15$ per paper is expensive but the membership gives you access to all papers and is relatively inexpensive. If you need to access research material frequently, you are probably better off having a membership and an ieee membership as well. You employer may pay it for you or you may get tax deductions for these fees as well.
Particularly now that much innovation in computing is happening in the developing world, the ACM's toll booth on reading the literature is especially repugnant.
Digital distribution is not costly. The definitive online library for CS should be free to read. If wikipedia et all can support themselves then it would be trivial for the equivalent of the ACM library to do likewise.
I do think it's reasonable for the ACM to charge for their other activities.
But to access it, you need to login i.e. its not a resource for the profession but for members only.
Old-style professional societies aspire to be synonymous with the profession, and they work toward that by adding value that everyone in the profession will want.
Paying professional society dues is a normal thing in most professions. It isn't weird for the ACM to act this way; it's weird (or at least new) for people to want to work in a high-paying, technically specialized profession, not pay professional society dues, and still get all the benefits of a professional society. Hey, if you bring us that utopia, more power to you, but I don't see anything broken about the current model from an adult's point of view. Students and faculty get access through their university, and everyone else makes good enough money to pay ACM dues. The weak point is kids, who are excluded by the current system (which was never meant to work for kids) unless they live near a university.
Maybe missing it, but strictly speaking as someone interested in reading (not publishing), I don't really see what the fuzz is. Been an ACM member for almost 10 years (started as a student member) and every single year I've been more than happy to renew my membership.
Sure, would be nice if everything was free, but all the stuff ACM does cost money, and honestly, the fees aren't all that outrageous, and the digital library access itself is very much worth it.
Rather like receiving Communications of the ACM every month (or close to it, anyway); I enjoy reading it and would totally forget about looking the articles online every month otherwise, so it's actually fairly convenient for me. Would much prefer that Queue had been kept around as a printed mag, though.
I'm currently a student member, and the only reason I'm still subscribed is the print magazine copies. I could probably get them from the library, but having it show up on my doorstep every month is convenient.
Plus, I believe I need to be a member for the ACM ICPC anyways.
Then it was the IEEExtreme competition that required IEEE membership.
And my institution is ACM affiliated as well, and also paid for my entrance fee to the ACM. But now that I think about it, I believe you're right, I don't think the ICPC required it.
I work at a company called DeepDyve; we work with publishers to provide alternative (cheaper) access models to their content. We have an online-only viewer and let you view articles for a limited amount of time (we call it a rental). If you are interested, please give it a shot and let me know how sufficient of an alternative it is. We currently allow 1 free rental (which will work for our ACM content), but we'll be adding free trials for our subscription plans instead very soon. http://www.deepdyve.comhttp://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers/association-for-co...
Unfortunately the situation is far worse in other fields of knowledge. Nature magazine got in a big fight with the University of California last year when they tried to charge more than $1 million for the institution's subscription[1] (this for a journal written and refereed by volunteer labor), and the individual subscriptions are also outrageous.
It costs a lot of money to be able to stay on the forefront of human knowledge, even though the producers of that knowledge don't see a red cent.
FWIW this problem exists in many other branches of science too. I'm glad that APS now has an option that the author of a paper can pay a fee for the peer review, and in turn obtains the right to make a copy of the paper publicly available ("open access").
It sounds a bit backwards, but in practice it works out (at least if your employer pays the open access fees, as mine does).
There are also peer reviewed Open Access journals, but mostly they don't have the same reputation and impact factors as the established ACM/APS/IEEE/whatever journals. Still http://www.doaj.org/ is quite interesting.
You can now also rent ACM papers via DeepDyve. The first one is free, so if you want to stick it to the man, register yourname+a@gmail.com, yourname+b@gmail.com, yourname+c@gmail.com ...
Not entirely sure if this also applies to the CS domain (been quite a few years since I published a CS paper) but in the medical domain researchers are also presented with the option of publishing in an open access journal. For example, PLoS http://www.plos.org/
The article is not completely correct about the copyright thing. As an ACM author you at least retain the right to publish the paper on your web site. This is much better than say for instance IEEE paper copyright regulations.
For those who want to know, ACM membership with access to all their journals (digital library) is $198/year. From developing countries, it is less. Choosing Poland as a random example, digital library access is $100/year.
Wow, this is a fairly condemning portrayal of the ACM. Thankfully, I've only once or twice bounced off of their paywall, and otherwise have been happily ignorant of their existence.
[EDIT] Removed reference to article being anecdotal.
I think the author of this piece misses a point. Let me take the example of the American Physical Society (APS). They have membership fees (required to go to their conferences) and journals which charge money for access. As with all academic publishing, you sign a copyright waiver (but you are allowed to post your article on your own homepage--also, for many of us, we initially publish things on arxiv.org in preliminary form (before peer review). So, you have two sources--the author if they choose to distribute it, and the arxiv for many papers (excepting breaking high profile papers that might appear in Science or Nature). Overall, the APS is relatively good--they provide much cheaper access rates to poorer institutions domestically (USA) and internationally.
Now, you might wonder--what is the value added that publishers provide? Governments pay for the research, government sponsored researchers do most of the initial typesetting/editing, and government sponsored researchers do the peer review. The answer is that publishers:
1) Screen the papers to send out for peer review
--there is a lot of noise in submissions. Is this paper interesting or not? Does it pass the "sniff" test on technical correctness?
To do this first pass requires editors with domain level knowledge of the field--they can skim the article if they are not experts and guess about impact/sniff/etc. They are familiar with the reputations of researchers. Essentially these are people with at least a PhD in the field and this is not cheap.
2) Again, the editors are acquainted with potential reviewers in the field. They have amassed a database of people who are good reviewers. For example, referee A always critical? Is referee B always a softee? Does referee C respond in a timely fashion? Does referee D always have his reviews overturned on appeal to an additional referee? Etc.
So, essentially, what you are paying for is screening out signal to noise. The first thing you might think of is, well, let the government step in. I think this would be very bad. Why? Because it would then be easy for the government to determine what gets published and what doesn't. Think climate change....
Next, you might think--ok, well what about open access? Again, the problem is that many open access journals (where the authors pay and the public reads for free) is that the prices to authors steadily increases and unless it is mandated, authors may seek other journals. Especially if the most prestigious journals are not open access....
Finally, you might ask, well, what about a technical solution?
Hacker News for academic publishing, complete with automated tracking of referees, calculations of reputations based on citations, commenting, etc. But, then you'll bump into problems of avoiding winner take all and that for academic publishing, you want the comments and referee process to be deliberate and considered.
What I would suggest is that for the computer science community to work harder on posting things to the arxiv before submitting to ACM journals and if that's not possible, then lobbying for journals to accept this. Then, for people who are ok with the rough version, they can access it and for people with need/resources, they can access the final, polished, piece.
In the meantime, try writing the author if you need a paper. In the physics community, many authors are happy to send you a pdf file. One time there was a paper from an expensive publication that we didn't have access to that I wrote the author to request a copy from. He actually sent a reprint--from Japan!
Ok, sure, we have all avoided his works because they're a pain to read, but he is someone you would expect to get along with the ACM as they needlessly peddled his and his peers' "methodologies".
[Edit: Seriously, in the last few days I had to step in an introduce no less than Matt Welsh and Rob Pike to HN, now Sommerville. HN's aversion to book-learnin' is surely paying off.]
Professional organizations have trouble with their revenue models.
The journal publishing business that the ACM and IEEE are in isn't sustainable long term, and drives people away or causes perverse benefit schemes, similar to how newspaper's business models fell apart in the last 10 years.
A better method would be to focus on conferences and community, which is more of the way that Usenix and LOPSA work.
That said, there's some solid stuff in the ACM journals, and their membership fees aren't all that crazy.
I can't wait until the dead tree editions of their publications go away.