ACM considered harmful
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2009/05/15/queue-cacm-and-the-re...
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!
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.
I will not be rejoining.
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.
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…
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.
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.)
I agree there is something wrong with the model, but I think your understanding of academia is flawed.
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.
I already paid for it. A fraction of my taxes go to funding educational organizations so that they can produce these papers.
Even then, if the $15 actually went back to the author, I'd be OK with double-dipping, but it doesn't.
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.
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.
That's a clue as to who the pricing is geared towards: staff of deep-pocketed corporations and institutions, not individual web users.
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.
However, I find this rather harsh aversion to paying a few bucks for peer-reviewed, scientific content curious.
I don't have a harsh aversion to paying for content, unless I've already paid for it with my taxes, which is often the case with scientific papers.
I do have a harsh aversion to rent-seeking middlemen who do nothing but put up a website and collect $15 fees to let me download other peoples' work.
For example, there is an ACM Portal page ( http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1553489 ) for a paper I wrote that is freely available from the conference site ( http://machinelearning.org/archive/icml2009/abstracts.html ).
There is no indication on the ACM page (the DOI on that page just returns the ACM page) that this content is available elsewhere without the $15 fee.
It's bordering on unscrupulous in my opinion.
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.
I'm not the only one, either: http://gmplib.org/~tege/acmspam.html http://fries.net/~david/thoughts/ACM_membership_spam.php
</rant>
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.
Kent Pitman has a similar stance:
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.
¹ Racist nomenclature thumbs down
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.
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!
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)
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.)
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.
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.
Stab stab stab -- the journal model is hopelessly outdated in the digital age, and the sooner it disappears, the better.
Revenue breakdown:
Conferences & Seminars: 23.25m
Publications: 14.8m
Membership Dues: 9.2m
Advertising: 1m
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.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...
[1] http://www.acm.org/publications/CopyReleaseProc-1.26.10.pdf
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.
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.
I find that open-source advocates tend to be open-information advocates as well.
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.
Plus, I believe I need to be a member for the ACM ICPC anyways.
My institution was ACM-affiliated, but I'm not sure that matters either.
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.
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.
[1]http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/06/university...
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.
[EDIT] Removed reference to article being anecdotal.
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!
pet peeve != constructive criticism
sensational title != worthy content
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Sommerville_(academic)
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.]
2. There is really no need for constructive criticism when someone does something that is very clearly wrong.
3. Titles aren't content, duh.
downvote parent == thanks!