Open access to ACM Digital Library during coronavirus pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Open access to ACM Digital Library during coronavirus pandemic

acm.org

278 pointsscott_s69 comments

The income from the ACM/IEEE's investment portfolio is large enough that it could fund all of arXiv.org's annual expenses ~20 times over, in perpetuity, without dipping into capital. See this thread for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22103763

Btw, ACM has started adding some drm banner (rightslink) to the papers. This seems like a recent addition. Why do these bodies (ACM/IEEE) exist ? I get the journal prestige angle and the loop that is hard to break, but for CS, most of it is conference driven. Any sub-field has about 50 people who call the shots. Why don't these 50 people decide not to be associated with ACM/IEEE ? What's in it for them ? Is it just apathy ? For example, the PC of a top conference (say ISCA) could just fork it for next year onwards (say to SCA) and remove the affiliation with ACM/IEEE. Since the sub-fields are quite small, there isn't a huge risk of loss of prestige or dilution. You follow where the PC goes. In general, the community decides that there are 3-4 top conferences in the area. Once you migrate those 3-4, you have taken back control. csrankings.org does a reasonable job of capturing the top conferences in every area. If you are on the PC of any of these conferences, I would like to know why this hasn't happened yet. Fortunately, some of the top ones (usenix ones, vldb, nips, etc.) are open access, and we should have all of them migrate.

If you would like please consider becoming a professional member $99/year of ACM then you also get access to Safaribooksonline. Personally I think its good value for money.

https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options

IIRC (admittedly it's been a few years), ACM Membership only got you access to a selection of material from Safari, not the whole thing.

That might have changed given that Safari has reorganized and changed like 5x in the past few years.

Anyone confirm?

Last year, I explicitly checked with Safari customer service about this, told them this is too good to be true since a regular Safari membership costs 3x of the ACM membership. The customer service replied and confirmed there is nothing different. So go for it :) The basic ACM membership is really a good deal.

Can also confirm it’s the full library, you just sign in via SSO. Happy to support the ACM too.

RE - you also get access to Safaribooksonline

when I checked this out a few years ago it was a subset of you also get access to Safaribooksonline - about 600 books only. Maybe it has changed now....

I have been a subscriber for 3 years, and can confirm it's the full SafariOnline subscription, on top of ACM Magazine (your choice or paper or electronic format), plus ACM DL Library.

Yes, it seems too good to be true. But it is real, and I am happy to support both services.

Does the base membership also offers access to the digital library?

There was never a reason this wasn't open access, except to hoard information. Someone archive this and make it free forever.

I'm really curious how such an organization can ever maintain their copyright in the future as the defense could always say the defendant obtained the pdf from the free trial.

The pdfs can be timestamped.

if you make this permanent I'd be happy to start paying my dues again

Same here.

Same here as well!

I know this place discourages this sort of thing, but really want to make this emphasized in case anyone from the ACM is reading:

same here x3!

As someone with a corporate account and a scihub user, I want to declare the same (this isn't new). Open access to civilization's research is the is how a mature civilization should behave. I would gladly start paying ACM dues again if they kept this access open.

Seconded. I loved having access to this as a student and would love other curious people to be able to get at these papers.

Part of me can't help but suspect that they are also doing this because, believe it or not, many computer science researchers don't know that these paywalls exist, because they are subscribed through their university. Now that they are stuck at home, these researchers could start noticing how inconvenient and ridiculous these paywalls are, given that they are the ones who write and typeset the papers and review the research for free.

So it may be a smart move for ACM to avoid making researchers aware of paywalls, and continuing to drag this outdated publication model for a few more years... (If I'm not mistaken, most subscription money comes from universities, which subscribe annually, and there's very little revenue from individual downloads, so most likely this measure isn't actually costing ACM much in terms of revenue.)

It's true (at least in my experience) that the paywall is transparently dealt with when connecting from a university network, but most sites make it pretty easy to access their content via your institutional login even if you're not.

At first glance this appears to include everything including conference proceedings, which makes it better than the access I had when I was in graduate school and better than I have currently as a standard ACM member. I hope I'm correct about that.

> better than the access I had when I was in graduate school

How did you function as a graduate student without access to conference proceedings?

> better than I have currently as a standard ACM member

I think that's only if you de-select the option for the library, which people often do if they have institutional access (which will be almost all academic and industrial researchers I guess.)

> How did you function as a graduate student without access to conference proceedings?

I don't remember too many instances where a paper I wanted could not be found (read into that whatever you like), but I do remember hitting some annoying limits in my institution's access.

> I think that's only if you de-select the option for the library, which people often do if they have institutional access (which will be almost all academic and industrial researchers I guess.)

I only recently signed up., but I think it's possible we're not talking about the same thing. If my base level membership has access to all conference proceedings without additional charge - which seems to be what your comment is implying - it's a pleasant surprise.

Check out the HOPL conferences, they're really fascinating. I'll post a link if I can find an index of them.

https://dl.acm.org/action/doSearch?AllField=HOPL&startPage=&...

Unfortunately, HOPL 4 has been postponed because of the virus, but that will be a hoot, with Rich Hickey, Don Syme, Dan Ingalls, Robert Harper, Brendan Eich, Walter Bright, Bjarne Stroustrup....

Alright, someone tell me what are some must downloads? I've been out of college for a while so haven't kept up.

edit: I am most interested in models of computing, and more recently ML-family of languages, and the theories behind it. I am also generally interested in those papers that people view as "classics" or serve as computing history. Hoares CSP, or most anything by Dijkstra that may not be public already.

What are you interested in? The recommendations I can make for someone fascinated with LISP are different than the ones I can make for someone interested in computing history are different than the ones I can make for someone interested in processor design and so on. There's a very wide selection here.

I'm not the GP but I'd be super interested in any computing history recommendations.

There was a decent response from someone else elsewhere in this thread that I'd recommend.

I'll take the "fascinated with LISP" ones :)

This should get you started; just some links I had laying around:

Connection Machine Lisp: fine-grained parallel symbolic processing; Steele, Hillis

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/319838.319870

I'm biased because this one is effectively "What if we make an APL Lisp?"

Design of a LISP-based microprocessor; Steele, Sussman

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/359024.359031

This one is one of the hundreds that came out of the Mead/Conway book. Basically, it's a LISP-based VLSI chip.

Turtles and defense; Sobalvarro, Klotz

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608

As 'donhopkins put it:

It was Leigh Klotz's sarcastic response to a Defense Department questionnaire to Terrapin about how their technology could be used to kill people.

He proposed deploying a swarm of thousands of LOGO turtles to crawl around the battlefield in mesmerizing geometric patterns, and stab the enemy with a quick succession of PENUP and PENDOWN commands (proving once again that the pen is mightier than the sword).

(For more information:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... )

I strongly recommend the first paper. I am still trying to realize something like it. I often wonder what Hillis and Steele would say about the topic..and whether they abandoned the idea because it wasn't tactically effective or whether it was just intractable.

really glad to see it mentioned...too much great thought gets lost

(scheme on silicon is up there too)

> I often wonder what Hillis and Steele would say about the topic..and whether they abandoned the idea because it wasn't tactically effective or whether it was just intractable.

You should email them and report back.

> I'm biased because this one is effectively "What if we make an APL Lisp?"

You might like this excerpt from the MIT Dynamic Languages Wizard's panel, where Guy Steele said [1]:

> Higher order functionals, I think, are underrated, and can be very good. As the years pass, the more I use Common Lisp, the more I find myself using the sequence functions, including a lot of mapcars. I had to do a matrix tensor product routine about two weeks ago, and I was puzzling over how to do the nested do loops and so forth, and finally I realized it was just mapcar of mapcar of apply of append to mapcar and mapcar, done. No big deal. In other words, thinking in APL should improve your Lisp code.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agw-wlHGi0E&feature=youtu.be...

Steele has many comments I love in regards to APL! Unlike many, he still sees it as a great path. He's a fantastic example of someone who's competent enough that they have no reason to slander other languages.

Given your submissions to HN I'd say just go with whatever you're interested in, it's bound to be good. ;-)

As for myself, anything in re: compiling functional and/or stack-based languages; and DSLs for GUIs.

Cheers!

APL compilation and interpretation by translating to F83VEC; Naugle

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/22415.22032

Here's a double-hitter: compiling a functional language (APL) to a stack-based language (FORTH).

awesome

- - - -

I found a couple of interesting tidbits:

Computer programming as an art, Donald E. Knuth https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361604.361612

Prolog - the language and its implementation compared with Lisp, David H D Warren, Luis M Pereira, Fernando C. N. Pereira https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/872734.806939

I'm interested in well written CS papers that have immediate practical value for a generalist backend software engineer.

Hi, I would like to hear more :)

This may not be what you want to hear, but for both of you:

APL Programming: A Psychological Model; R. Hooker

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800058.801100

A list from 10 years ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9220o/ask_prog...

What are you interested in? If you like Ruby I maintain a list at https://rubybib.org/, and many of the ones with a paywall tag are now freely available and weren't before.

HOPL (History of Programming Languages) conference notes. I can't confirm that they're on there yet but they're riveting.

ETA: They are!

https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025

https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766

https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844

I don't see anything for III

I'll dig it up

Start here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1411838

And hit the 'next' button to get at the subsequent papers.

Couldn't find an index.

The transcripts of the question and answer sessions are excellent. Thank you!

Can we shame the IEEE and their Computer Society into doing the same?

https://twitter.com/ComputerSociety/status/12451145516722135...

Do you have any tip for android app that can provide some enhanced experience reading the pdf articles (like from ACM?) on Android mobile phone?

I don't mean generic PDF reader for Android. I'm looking for something that provides similar user experience like Firefox's "reader view". Is there something like that?

It should be Open Access all the time. Keep the change!

This is great news, and a kind gesture of the ACM. I used to be a member, fell off years ago, but this might inspire me to re-join. I'd been thinking membership was >= $199, maybe it used to be? but now @ $99 it seems worthwhile.

Total unrelated aside: it's funny that the name of the person making this announcement has a name which is essentially two foods ("Cherri Pancake"). Then again, I had a classmate in primary school whose name was Candy Kane (well, Candice, but yes she went by "Candy" in 4th grade).

I wrote a paper for an ACM conference back in the early 80's. It has existed behind a paywall ever since. I fail to see how this is aligned with the concept of sharing science...when an organization takes ownership of papers just because they happen to put on a conference. In my opinion, the same applies to IEEE and other organizations. And this, again, my opinion, is particularly true of taxpayer-funded university research that ends-up behind paywalls.

You can usually get away with putting out a preprint in public (basically the paper slightly modified), and anything really good is often duplicated elsewhere. There are some gems behind the digital library paywall, but google scholar is really good at sniffing out free links. At any rate, I totally agree that the Digital Library should be a force for good and only openness can accomplish that goal. Most new papers are openly available (authors have to pay more, however), but that isn't good enough.

"Your IP Address has been blocked - Please contact dl-support@acm.org" :(

After just 100 DLs. Does anyone know whether I really have to write a mail or will the block get lifted after x hours?

They gave you access to read... not to download and read later. So no shock you got blocked.

IMHO as a life-long ACM member... library access should be permanently free. But that's clearly not what they have chosen to do.

Hell, I used to get blocked just for opening 8 papers in new tabs. Getting blocked after a 100 paper bender is pretty good luck!

Cough VPN. Blocked again? New VPN location, and so forth.

I've been unblocked in the meantime - guess I'll use the VPN option later.

This is awesome! Great decision by the folks at ACM! well done guys!!

Is ACM membership useful for just typical developers not in research or grad school?

Don't call yourself a typical developer and read up!

I joined the ACM in college. I found the library pretty useful as a "typical developer" and took good advantage of the free access that my employers provided. I paid for ACM library access out of my own pocket when I left for a smaller company, but let it lapse a couple years ago when I realized that most of the papers I was reading were also available elsewhere, and that the journals I was following no longer had as many compelling papers.

(Reading papers on a regular basis is something that I encourage developers and managers to do; it's a good way to expand your toolkit and get ideas for different ways to solve things. A paper a week -- maybe an hour a week, on average -- and that's like fifty new things you've been exposed to in a year. These add up, and eventually can make a big difference in how you approach problems).

yes. depends what you are working on. if I need an on-disk range search structure its pretty irreplaceably valuable to be able to do a literature search and catch up to decades worth of thought on the topic. I'm not going to do nearly as well with just a whiteboard marker and some coffee.

lock free data structures. static analysis. solvers for systems of equations. cache maintenance techniques. concurrency control. etc.

most jobs though don't afford the latitude/scope for you to be looking into details like that in the first place.

I'm really hoping they'll open IEEE journals as well.

Now their fancy js pages don't load

"... if that really is your name."

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