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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.