US Gov Requests Feedback on Open Access – ACM Gets it Wrong (Again) | Hacker News Reader

US Gov Requests Feedback on Open Access – ACM Gets it Wrong (Again)

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69 pointsdrallison10 comments

What a golden quote:

"How would U.S. voters react to a Senator claiming that a given piece of legislation (say, one reducing restrictions on campaign financing) “strikes a fundamental balance between the needs of the Senate and those of the United States of America”?

In my minds eye, I saw Joe Lieberman giving a press conference: "The health-care bill now strikes an appropriate balance between the interests of Joe Lieberman and those of the United States of America".

Well, that actually seems more reasonable than the ACM situation. I expect Lieberman, as an individual, to have interests that are not the same as his constituents'. (He may be derelict in his duty as a Senator if he puts his own interests above those of his constituents, but that's a discussion for another day.) But there's no reasonable expectation, in my mind, that Lieberman's interests as an individual and my interests as a voter are going to be the same.

Likewise, I wouldn't expect the interests of one of the ACM's directors -- as individuals -- to be the same as the ACM's membership. (I'd want them to set aside their personal interests while acting in their official capacity within the organization, but that's different from saying that their personal interests don't exist.) But I would expect the ACM as an organization to reflect the interests of the membership.

When an organization that supposedly exists for the benefit of its membership starts doing things that are almost certainly out of line with the best interests of the membership, it's a good sign that the organization has been subverted and is being used for some other purpose (e.g. simple self-perpetuation).

I like the Lieberman joke, but the original metaphor isn't quite right; there's definitely a difference between (on the one hand) the relationship between the ACM as an organization and its members, and (on the other hand) the US Senate and the citizens it represents.

It's very possible for an organization to have interests that are not identical with the interests of its constituent members.

I just left the following comment on the OSTP blog: (We submitted an NSF proposal yesterday, so this is particularly well-timed.)

As a graduate student and researcher in Computer Science I would welcome the application of NIH’s open publication policy to NSF funded research as well. I just helped submit an NSF proposal and would welcome such guidelines on our research. We already follow them for the most part, and it would help us ensure that conferences and publishers won’t object to the dissemination of the results of our research if it’s not just our own desire, but an obligation from our funding agency.

I would also appreciate if you look into the feasibility of establishing open data and open source requirements for the CISE division of NSF where funded projects would be obligated provide data generated as part of the research (this isn’t always reasonable, so some care will be necessary in formulating this policy) as well as source code used. Right now, especially in computer science, it’s extremely difficult to replicate the results of experiments and often we find that researchers have to invest time in reverse engineering someone’s experiment simply to be able to compare the results one research got with the results of another or their own work. In addition, university technology transfer departments sometimes get in the way of researchers who try and open up their work. Making this a firm requirement from the funding agency provides the researchers with the credibility and leverage they need to ensure technology transfer departments stop interfering with dissemination efforts.

It’s rare someone ever asks for a requirement, but in this case I think extending these types of requirements to NSF programs will give us the power and leverage we need to overcome the obstacles in the way of disseminating our work in the fashion we’d like to be doing anyways.

Article is spot on.

This makes me want to cancel my ACM membership. Which I only got in the first place so that I could get access to their digital library of published papers.

I'm sure they're worried about a membership drop, but you really would think that the ACM of all people would understand that false scarcity is not a business model for information-based organizations in today's world.

The ACM have always been a bucket of dicks -- their Digital Library index pages dominate Google search results but have no content.

They used to have some intentionally confusing text like "Please login with your free ACM Web Account to see the full text". Sure the account itself is free, but the subscriptions required to see anything ain't. All that happened is that I get spammed by them regularly with Join ACM today and receive a 15% discount plus an ACM Free World Clock Calculator!

A desk calculator! I don't see how they could be more out of touch.

As much as I'd like to see open access to ACM and other journals, I wonder how much it would benefit anyone? Surely almost everyone doing that work has a subscription. If not an outright membership, at least the University library will get them the articles.

Screw ACM, glad I ignored all their spamming to get me to renew my membership. Never again.

Good thing my ACM membership has just expired.

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