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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

I think the ACM should support young and female researchers by making all their papers open access, publicly endorsing Sci-hub, and committing to send Sci-hub some money every month. That would have a much bigger impact than scholarships and workshops.

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ACM members can offer their papers open-access legally and for free, helped by the ACM.

ACM has an authorizer service that allows you as an author, to publish special links on your personal website, that will offer all visitors of your personal web-site free downloads of your papers.

Those who are interested in your paper don't need an account, they just need to click on the special links published on your website and the paper will be free to download in PDF.

A lot of the relevant authors are already dead, and many more of them will be in the next ten years, so this is not good enough. It may reduce ACM's conflict with authors but it doesn't particularly help a researcher who's trying to track down a result someone published in CACM 40 years ago.

I mean sure, making papers by underrepresented groups open access to increase their reach is actually a nice idea. Not sure what this has to do with sci-hub though, publishers are not going to fund sci-hub in the same way that the RIAA is not going to fund the pirate bay.

I don't mean they should make papers by underrepresented groups open access. I mean they should make the papers researchers need to read open access so that access to those papers isn't conditional on getting into a rich university, thus reducing the barriers to underrepresented groups and everyone else. By "their papers" I meant "the ACM's papers", not "the papers of young and female researchers".

It's extremely unfortunate that the ACM has been degraded into being a "publisher" rather than a learned society, and I agree that as long as they think of themselves that way, they will continue to obstruct progress and reproduce patterns of social and economic inequality in the way they are currently doing.

Cannot agree more.

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