The Road to Serfdom, ACM edition | Hacker News Reader

The Road to Serfdom, ACM edition

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

59 pointsyummyfajitas15 comments

At least for computer scientists, one alternative is to publish at conferences which are either run by Usenix, or where Usenix is a co-sponsor, since at least Usenix requires that the papers be released on the Usenix website w/o any kind of ACM-style b.s. paywall.

At this point, my personal policy is simply to refuse submit or assist with any conference where papers are held hostage behind a paywall, whether it is ACM or some other organization. Fortunately I'm not an academic, and so I don't have to get tenure, so it's relatively easy for me to have this policy. But if enough people do this, maybe ACM will either (a) get this message, or (b) disappear, like the dinosaurs....

This is a pretty common problem across the spectrum of scientific publishing. The best way to solve this is to dissolve groups like the ACM and make all scientific published facts, notes, journals, etc the legal property of those who founded the research.

In the mean time, the best way to stop this nonsense is to refuse to cite papers from publishers who won't give authors the right to publish their papers outside of their systems and who charge people to access their systems.

A bit more on the pro-activity front, I'd suggest that every time they send you a plea to join, you send back in their postage paid envelope a nicely typed letter detailing just how cold it will need to be in hell before you would every join or re-join...

Or explain the problem exactly and what changes would be required for you to join. If enough such letters came back to them, it might actually have an effect.

I'm sure there are plenty of ACM members on this site. How difficult would it be to elect a council that will pursue a more open policy?

Personally, I let my ACM membership lapse after finishing college (and seeing the corresponding rate hike) since it seems clear that the ACM is not acting in the best interests of its members.

Here are my thoughts:

1) Big professional societies like ACM and IEEE will not just dissolve or go away (I vaguely remember being told that IEEE was the largest professional society in the world!). This is a good thing. We need these to manage the complicated management of prestige in the academic fields, e.g. senior members, fellows, etc and arrange conferences and similar gatherings. I am a member of IEEE (been for the past 11 years) and will gladly pay my dues just for these services.

2) However, the outdated paper publishing approach that these societies are pursuing has to be stopped. Now, it won't stop on its own because of the "if it ain't broke" principle. There has to be some definitive act to show the world a better solution. This could be (i) creating a website and put pirated versions of all recent papers (e.g. in the last 10 years) for selected journals, while offering much better search tools than are currently offered at the society web sites; and/or (ii) convincing more and more professionals to put up papers on personal pages, make it prestigious to do so, again perhaps using a central site, similar to Citeseer.

I am a non-academic.

"We need these to manage the complicated management of prestige in the academic fields, e.g. senior members, fellows, etc and arrange conferences and similar gatherings."

Can I ask why? There are lots of well-organized conferences and gatherings in the non-academic software world -- is there something peculiar to academia that makes organizing harder? Ditto prestige management -- what would go wrong if there weren't a body handing out status awards?

The "management" of prestige is a problem not a solution. It leads academics to non-optimal and even immoral decisions.

I think there are several differences between academic and non-academic world and bodies like are current solutions:

1) In the non-academic world, prestige (or whatever you want to call it) is measured by the projects, you've done, your blog, your HN, SO, etc. karma points. There are no good analogs of these in academia.

2) Academia is much more international. When I meet a professor who is an IEEE Fellow from, say, China, that gives me a certain understanding of their accomplishments (I know, flawed, but sometimes the only way, if s/he's from a university you don't know). If, on the other, you meet a hacker from Japan, he might tell you the open source projects he contributed, companies he started, etc.

3) Then there's the question of paper review. Based on the huge number of papers to be reviewed, there's a need for a body to organize the process and find qualified people to review them.

I'm not saying the system is ideal, but the same type of academic organizations have sprouted in many different disciplines. Maybe Internet tools will change the situation. Note that academic people are usually old, so we need to wait for the next generation to become professors to see the full effect.

On IEEE: http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html

Wow. I was not aware of those policies. I'm suddenly very glad I let my membership lapse.

I have been a member of the ACM off and on since the mid 1970s. I am disappointed by some aspects of their more recent behavior, but for now I will keep up with my current membership.

It is really awful that authors can't post their own papers on their web sites, etc.

With these kinds of terms, it seems ACM are firmly on the Road to Irrelevance!

what is ACM? :)

Personally, the most interesting, for me at least, articles of the last decade - the ones of Perelman's - i read from the arXiv.

Until the last couple of years, having free access to IEEE, i was checking my former branch of science there as well - nothing new or interesting, just minor variations, improvements and recombinations of previous results. Nothing that i'd pay money to read.

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