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yig | 7 months ago

New articles are Creative Commons (CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND).

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kragen|7 months ago

The new articles aren't important.

The ACM is probably never again going to publish a paper as influential as Liskov's paper I mentioned above, or Knuth's "Structured Programming With go to Statements", or "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362929.362947, or Schorre's "META-II: A Syntax-Oriented Compiler Writing Language" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800257.808896, or Ken Thompson's "Regular Expression Search Algorithm" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363347.363387, or Dan Ingalls on "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762.

Papers like those are the ones that we need to protect our ability to archive and distribute. Not David Geerts's "The Transformative Power of Inspiration" from the current issue of CACM https://cacm.acm.org/careers/the-transformative-power-of-ins.... (I am not making this up.) Thompson was competing with, let's say, Mooers and Schorre; Geerts has decided instead to compete with Jesus, the Buddha, and Norman Vincent Peale, and my brief reading of the article does not offer much hope for his prospects.

It seems safe to say that in 30 or 100 years' time nobody will cite Geerts's article as a turning point in the human understanding of inspiration, so if it's lost due to copyright restrictions, it probably won't matter that much.

At the other extreme, scholars seeking to understand the historical origins of object-orientation or personal computers would be crippled without access to material like Ingalls's paper. I'm not speculating—I'm speaking from experience, because lacking that access, I grew up thinking C++ was object-oriented!

But what do we see on the current version of the Ingalls paper that the ACM's web server just gave me? A note added in 02002 prohibiting public archival and redistribution:

> Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work or 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. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

westurner|7 months ago

> probably never again going to publish

Does this mean that ScholarlyArticles that authors choose to publish with ACM can be uploaded to e.g. ArXiv in full instead of only the preprints?

(If you upload PostScript and PDF to ArXiv, they can generate an HTML5 rendering of the article.)

Open access > Effects on scholarly publishing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

I learned OO from lots of great resources, and may have been disadvantaged to have have never read Ingall's paper; which isn't yet cited in Wikipedia's OO page under History.

Object orientated programinng > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming#Hi...

"'Considered harmful' considered harmful"

Considered harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

Edsger Dijkstra published "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" (1998) with CACM.

bpt3|7 months ago

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth...

And to claim that new articles aren't important or that the ACM will never publish a highly impactful paper again is absurd.

Enjoy your free access to a wealth of human knowledge you played no part in creating, rather than waving a meaningless declaration around demanding more for nothing and demeaning individual authors.