Comment by cscotta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cscotta | Hacker News Reader

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"It's maddening to see an article that you think will let you make progress in a problem you're working on, but unable to access it because of the $15 fee..."

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.

You mean, check with my local library here in Poland, right?

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.

You can put me in the "doesn't want to pay for content" box when it comes to science. Science, including computer science works best when new discoveries are spread far and wide free of charge. Journals make their money by securing publication rights in exchange for deciding that something is important enough. Once, it was difficult to publish information to a wide audience, but in the web age, journals seem like a bit of a scam to me.

The curation job still needs paying for, but I think it's pretty clear that the ACM and others have strayed from that to trying to squeeze the long tail for as much money as they can can get.

Besides, does peer-review cost anything for them? The one time I was asked by an ACM journal to review a paper for them, there was no monetary exchange involved.

Yes, or the library of the nearest university will be likely to grant you access for a small fee even if you are not a student there, plus you will also get access to their books.

Problem is, most papers aren't that good or are not relevant to what you're doing, but it's usually hard to tell based on the abstract. When I do research in a subject, I find ~10 papers out of which I'll read (parts of) maybe one. If I were to buy each of them for $15, I'd end up paying $150, and only get a few pages of read useful material out of it.

Exactly, without a strong reference from someone you trust who also knows the subject, you have no idea if the article is worth $15. And then you could probably just make a copy of their copy.

There is no way you can know if the content of the article will actually be useful - there goes $15 down the drain. if my local library has ACM access, yay... but it doesn't. So they get content for free from academics, sell it at a profit, while the academics get nothing for their work and have their content limited to an audience that might not be the one they actually want to reach - it could be, but they've just signed away their content for nothing and have no control on who can can see it, not even they can see it... Some academics publish just because they have to, so ACM is fine for them, but a lot are not like that, and ACM is taking advantage of the situation.

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 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.

Just because an organization receives some tax-based revenue from the government doesn't mean their operations are or can be fully-funded by that

I'd gladly pay the author of the paper, the ACM not so much.

If you know the article you want to read and immediacy isn't a concern you can probably look the authors up and send them an email. Many would be happy to send you a pdf.

I've frequently Googled paper names from ACM and found that the author has put them on their own site as direct downloads. So, yes, I definitely second you but.. check their site first before you e-mail them too ;-)

It depends on the article. Yes, there are some articles I would gladly pay $15 for (like Boneh/Shaw's work on collusion secure fingerprinting). However, in a lot of cases, I'm going to read a paper for its citations. If I have to pay $15 for that paper, and then pay over and over again for each additional paper that I want, the costs quickly become unsustainable.

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.

"If I have to pay $15 for that paper, and then pay over and over again for each additional paper that I want, the costs quickly become unsustainable."

That's a clue as to who the pricing is geared towards: staff of deep-pocketed corporations and institutions, not individual web users.

/r/scholar on Reddit is very useful for this. A polite request almost always brings a .pdf within a few hours, or a day or so at the most.

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.

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