ACM Is Now Open Access

[macintux]

Discussed extensively two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991 (243 comments)

[theodpHN]

As noted above, 'Fully Open Access' does not mean completely free. So, while this change is welcome, there are still a lot of pricing/licensing options:

Corporate https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/corporate-pri...

Government https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/government/dl...

Academic Institutions https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen

Individuals https://dl.acm.org/action/publisherEcommerceHelper?doi=10.55...

Also, the 'Basic Edition' provided for free to individuals without institutional/individual accounts, the ACM explains, does not include niceties such as 'Advanced Search' (e.g., filters), which requires an upgrade https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55017806873_c9ba2490c1_b...

[layer8]

Someone will probably build an external search index.

[lioeters]

Let's do a "best of" ACM, to list everyone's favorite articles.

First thing that comes to mind for me are the series of articles presented at HOPL conferences, History of Programming Languages.

HOPL II (1993) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766

HOPL III (2007) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844

HOPL IV (2021) https://dl.acm.org/do/10.1145/event-12215/abs/

[chaboud]

I love that I can now just drop the link to this gem:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165555.1165556

Aggregability is NP-Hard... Useful the next time someone insists that it's possible to find a "perfect" model for a non-trivial ML problem. (I get this ask 1-2 times per month.)

[leoc]

(As others have said, it's probably better to choose the doi.org URL over the dl.acm.org one in general. Three cheers for HOPL!)

[kensai]

Where is HOPL I? Could only find this: https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8

[lioeters]

OK, I made a post about it.

Ask HN: Favorite Articles in the ACM Digital Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460953

[vinni2]

While it is free for readers, authors or author institutions still need to pay to publish the papers.

> Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

https://cc.acm.org/2026/open-access/

[random3]

Given the current trends in publishing "productivity" that may not be a bad thing.

[pm90]

Is that … a bad thing? I know that peer reviewing takes time (although iirc journals don’t pay reviewers). And there is overhead around publishing which needs to be covered somehow.

[jules]

This is good, but they're now charging authors a publishing fee of over $1000 per article (and they say that that is the discounted price). It is unclear whether this is justified. In my experience publishing scientific articles with ACM, all the real work (such as peer review) is done by volunteers. From what I can tell, ACM just hosts the exact PDF + metadata that authors supply. I suspect that in the future, more journals and conferences will switch to an arXiv-overlay model.

[raphman]

I have volunteered in various roles for ACM conferences and thus have some insight into ACM's path towards Open Access over the past years.

Just a few things to consider:

- ACM is not a for-profit publisher like Springer or Elsevier. Any profits made from their/our publishing activities subsidize e.g., outreach activities, travel stipends for developing countries, and potential losses from e.g. conferences. - In my experience, ACM is one of the very few publishers in computer science where you can generally trust the published papers. - Keeping a long-term digital library is not just "putting PDFs on a server" but involves a lot of additional costs. The ACM HQ is rather lean IMHO, but there are multiple people involved in developing the Digital Library, handling cases of copyright infringement and plagiarism, supporting volunteers, etc. Also, the ACM DL contains a rising number of video recordings of conference talks, etc. Additionally, there are several contractors to be paid. For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara. - In the past, subscriptions to the ACM Digital Library were a major, stable source of income for ACM. ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.

[ghshephard]

I'm pretty sure the primary purpose of the $1000 is just to create some small gate to avoid overloading reviewers/ACM. There are probably other mechanisms that could be used - such as having "recommendations" for from already approved researchers - I think arXiv has something like that.

[elashri]

> ACM will become one of the very few organizations to offer a large, integrated, and highly curated library of articles and related artifacts openly accessible to all

Is there anything specific about them doing that? Most of the publishers are now moving to open access model (where they charge authors thousands and still not paying for reviewers) so not sure about their claim here.

[thechao]

I was in academia for only a few years. I did a lot of reviewing (one of the chores for graduate students). I don't know what to say, here; there needs to be an economically based gate keeper for publication & review. Otherwise you'll get spammed by hundreds (per graduate student) of crazy-people papers. I was in a niche PL subfield (generic programming in the mid-2000s), and there was this one guy I called "guitar dude" that kept submitting PL papers using "guitar theory". The basis of the theory was an "algorithm" he developed to determine if a number was prime in O(1) (constant!!?) time in the size of the number. He was by far the most determined; he had a "swap" scam he ran to get his papers in. OTOH, submissions to the editor (my PI) numbered in the THOUSANDS, and we only had, like, 35 attendees at GPCE? I can't imagine what Nature or Science have to deal with.

I don't know how submission works for non-Western subsidized countries; but, just wading through the pre-AI submission process was a 50+-hour a week job for one, tiny, niche conference. Making the cost $1000 cuts that down by at least 2 orders of magnitude.

On the flip side ... paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea? Reviewers need to be skeptical AF. Even the best scientists can throw out turds every now and then.

[scott_s]

Great news. They temporarily opened it in 2020 during the pandemic. I argued it should remain so in a post: https://www.scott-a-s.com/acm-digital-library-should-remain-.... I'm glad it's finally happened.

[colesantiago]

This is a great start, but it is not enough.

We need to keep pushing for other journals, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, to be open access and free for all.

[scott_s]

IEEE may do it, as it's a professional organization. That is, they're a non-profit dedicated to the furtherance of the field. Being open access fits their mission, and the costs can be handled by dues and fees. Springer and Elsevier are for-profit publishers. I don't know how if they can have an open-access business model.

[logifail]

I'm not sure "open access" in this context actually means, err, that the access is actually open.

[tokai]

Available to read is not open access. Sadly publishers have completely subverted the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access. It's about rights, not allowed to read the text.

[QuantumNomad_]

For anyone else wondering what the definition in Budapest Open Access Initiative is:

> By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself

https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/

[riazrizvi]

Finally. This might have a material impact on improving professional standards in the industry.

Here’s the actual link to content https://dl.acm.org/

[ModernMech]

This is great news and really makes me want to submit to ACM over IEEE.

[rgreekguy]

They are both hosted on the same platform, which is owned by John Wiley & Sons.

[zkmon]

More fodder for LLMs? I don't think humans are going to directly consume all that text.

[pm90]

Most researchers publish their papers to arxiv anyway which LLMs can freely access.

[tokai]

Don't they already train on the shadow libraries?

[SkySkimmer]

and at the same time paywalled metadata https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-o...

[bugglebeetle]

This is lame, but always remember that OpenAlex exists and is completely free:

https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.so...

[jhallenworld]

Imagine a world where you can click on references in your paper and have them immediately come up, like the rest of the web. This can be done today:

Always provide a DOI-style link, for example: https://doi.org/10.1088/0029-5515/30/2/001

These can be easily changed to actual working links with a simple browser substitution rule: replace the "doi.org" with "sci-hub.se" or whatever.

[agumonkey]

Kudos. I wonder how long it took to 1) decide this move, 2) actually migrate their system