[DonaldPShimoda]

A lot of discussion about the benefits/drawbacks of open access publishing, but I don't see anybody talking about the other thing that's coming along with this commitment to open access: the ACM is introducing a "premium" membership tier behind which various features of the Digital Library will be paywalled. From their info page [0], "premium" features include:

  * Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery
  * AI-generated article summaries
  * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
  * Advanced search
  * Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and citations received
  * Bulk citation exports and PDF downloads

The AI-generated article summaries has been getting a lot of discussion in my social circles. They have apparently fed many (all?) papers into some LLM to generate summaries... which is absurd when you consider that practically every article has an abstract as part of its text and submission. These abstract were written by the authors and have been reviewed more than almost any other part of the articles, so they are very unlikely to contain errors. In contrast, multiple of my colleagues have found errors of varying scales in the AI-generated summaries of their own papers — many of which are actually longer than the existing abstracts.

In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials.

I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/premium

[1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."

[jojomodding]

They also prefix every PDF with a useless page telling you the authors (which are already listed on the first (now second) page anyways) and a list telling you which of the author's universities were members of ACM Open and paid for the publishing via flatrate.

The latter is of course the actual reason for this extra page, but it is also entirely useless information since the people reading the paper don't care. The people writing the paper are also usually annoyed by this (source: I'm an author of one such paper)

[kleiba]

> * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions

Also AI-generated, presumably.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Yeah, that's my assumption, too. I hate it.

[th0ma5]

I came here with this perspective and it made the rest of the thread feel like submarine PR cleanup for this mess. Perhaps they can afford to keep their high profits because of AI company money?

[jldugger]

I'm kinda okay with putting the AI slop behind a paywall if it means nobody will actually see it.

[b33j0r]

There will be customers even though it is a useless feature tier.

Monetizing knowledge-work is nearly impossible if you want everyone to be rational about it. You gotta go for irrational customers like university and giant-org contracts, and that will happen here because of institutional inertia.