ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile | Hacker News Reader

ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile

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177 pointsmitchbob49 comments

Looks like they have a bunch of papers about my current interest (FORTH - in fact there there is (was: final issue 1994) a SIGFORTH). I came to ask how you actually read the papers but I found out there are PDF icons you can click on when you do a search on https://dl.acm.org/

I came here wondering if anyone has already dug out this piece of information. It's wonderful news and the announcement does mention the ACM Digital Library, but a link would have been very welcome.

To the ACM, Thank You!

It is important for our industry and for all of humanity that this information be freely available to all.

Wonder if this is related to,

> As of July 1, 2022, you will no longer have to access the O’Reilly Learning platform as a benefit of your ACM membership. Despite our best efforts, O’Reilly Media is unwilling to continue to license their content to ACM for members.

The O'Reilly library is great and justified the prices of an ACM membership, but I don't think journal access and my monthly copy of Communications will be enough to keep me come renewal.

Unless, of course, they find something equally valuable to replace the O'Reilly catalog with.

$100 for a ACM membership $500 for O'Reilly. I can see why O'Reilly didn't want to renew. Learning materials are pretty slim with O'Reilly removed.

You are right of course. Maybe a narrower selection would work, instead of zero access now.

TBH I don't know what O'Reilly is thinking with that price point. I wish they had a "lite" version with just book access or something, because honestly that's all I ever use.

ACM used to have full access to the O'Reilly online catalog e.g. "live training", and other things. I don't remember exactly when but we got a scaled down version of it, limited to books and video.

I dont see myself supporting OReilly at that price especially when they run at least once a year a 50% discount (black friday).

ACM offers other sources for books, not as complete catalogue but skillsoft has Manning Publications and No Starch Press, so from IT point of view, already great. I might miss the conference and some books there and there, but what is available is already great. Libgen/youtube and the like will cover the remaining.

That's a shame. I don't think I got that email yet; do you have the subject line?

I actually joined ACM because O'Reilly did some sketchy stuff with my Safari membership a couple years ago. They sent me an email with an offer to upgrade from Safari to "O'Reilly online learning" with a discount for the first year, and the links were all going to genuine domains. But whenever I tried to actually do it, there was no way for me to see/do the offer on their site, despite being within the offer window. I wrote to confirm I wanted to use the discount, and asked for help, and they just wrote back and said "send us the email."

So instead, I used all my download tokens (which also broke and required contacting support), canceled, and got an ACM membership for much cheaper. (Which I would have done anyway had I had a reason to seek it out.) Oh well. There is enough web content today that I don't think it matters that much.

Yes, I got email , I think yesterday. O'Reilly was really useful platform for learning. It seems they couldn't renegotiate it for ACM users. To be honest I could have paid more to have O'reilly access.

> do you have the subject line?

The email I received had subject line: Notice Regarding Your Access to O'Reilly Content

Why would it be related? Losing the O’Reilly platform makes your ACM membership less valuable. I don’t see this making it more valuable.

If anything, it makes it less valuable, as subscribing won’t gain you access to papers published before 2000 anymore (you’ll still have it, but you also will have it is you aren’t an ACM member)

I didn't realize these articles were already available for me. You're right then that this doesn't exactly add value to an ACM membership. But maybe this is to make room to expand the ACM Digital Library in other ways.

I will quit ACM, this is the only perk that mattered.

Downvoters: fine downvote me, but can you also name a perk that matters?

The unlimited access to the digital library is nice, even though you need to pay extra. I don't think for example IEEE offers a similar benefit.

Well, shit. I really loved that benefit. I might have to see if my employer will pay for a membership.

Now I have to figure out if there's a way to save all my playlists and notes. Guess I didn't think about the potential downsides of storing all those in a system I don't own.

Oh well... O'Reilly themselves have been losing publishers, a lot of their books (especially containing math) are formatted like crap, their tagging is terrible. Hopefully ACM can make some direct deal with major publishers like MIT Press and Manning.

Nice. I used to maintain an ACM membership (when I wasn't working for a company that provided their Digital Library access), and going through the most recent SIGs and things like Computing Surveys were a critical part of my continuing learning.

Papers are a lot more accessible now, and I have enough "firehose" to read without needing an ACM sub, but this is useful.

Does a curated list of important papers exist? It would be great to have a guide to this resource.

I was coming to ask that same question...

I spent an hour searching the library, and found some good articles, though I bet none of them will appear on a "best of" list. But I don't care--this is infinite fun.

I just purchased a subscription to the ACM + Digital Library to get access to historical papers. Oh well. At least I can benefit from the free access to O'Reilly until their agreement is over.

That being said, I'm glad they're opening access. This is huge. People should read more about early works that established our field. I personally am interested in the history of computing, especially operating systems and programming languages. I encourage the HN crowd to search for names like Edsger Dijkstra, Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, Barbara Liskov, Per Brinch Hansen, David Parnas, Fred Brooks, Alan Perlis, John Backus, John McCarthy, Alan Kay, and many other pioneers in the field.

This is nice and all, but there's no valid justification for any of the material in the digital library to be locked behind a paywall in the first place. Most of the research published by ACM was paid for by taxpayers, and authors have to either sign over copyright or grant exclusive publishing rights. To be fair, ACM's fees are far more reasonable than the big publishing companies, and there are open access options available (at a cost to authors).

They opened the whole thing up for unlimited access for a brief period during the pandemic, but decided to walk that back after just three months. If you know where to look, there's a 500gb torrent floating round with the 480k+ papers that were accessible as of June 2020.

It's sad that in this day and age, particularly with the widespread acceptance of open source, most academic publications are still behind a paywall. We shouldn't even be having discussions about "open access"; the "open" part should just be implicit.

Agreed, and the post does say they plan to make it all freely available within five years. Why the delay? I don’t know.

Their plan is to open everything once they have enough organizations signed up for their ACM OPEN plan (basically once they replace the current income from the digital library).

Now if only we could get IEEE to make the same kind of committment...

To their credit, US and EU funding agencies agree with you! Back at the start of 2016 or so, the NSF started adding clauses to grant contracts requiring that all research supported by new NSF awards be deposited in its open access repository: https://par.nsf.gov/ Results from there don't seem to show up in major search engines, neither academic (Google Scholar, DBLP), nor general (DDG, Google). Nevertheless, many ACM articles from the past 5 years can be found there. Similar repositories exist for other funding agencies.

Also worth noting: Many ACM publications will be cross-posted on ArXiV (https://arxiv.org) or faculty webpages. It's an open secret that many faculty will publish "preprint" versions of their articles there after the paper passes peer review, but before they sign any licensing agreement with a publisher.

Reading some of these old publications is wonderful. I inherited my grandfather’s papers a few years, among the gems was a collection of ACM conference notes and papers related to AI… from 1982. It was quite the journey through some of that material to see what was familiar, what was archaic, what was amazing back then by seems banal today, and the surprisingly large amount of material that remains relevant today.

I remember about 15 years ago I went on a binge of downloading ACM papers via the university library while I was an undergrad. Didn't think anything of it, I found all those papers interesting, and I was studying the topic, so why not?

Soon enough, my account got soft-banned and the library sent out an email reminding the whole 20,000-odd people at the uni what the Terms of Service are :)

I guess now the ACM admits it was no biggy after all ...

Should we really thank them for doing something that they could have done the whole time? They could make the entire catalog free and open to all if they actually cared about advancing the field.

ACM is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. It's not like they're profiteering (cough Elsevier). They have to cover costs somehow.

Isn't that what membership fees are for? If they came out and said "our entire publication catalog is free, but to cover the costs of hosting we are raising membership prices from 100$ to 105$ a year", I don't think any of their members would mind.

Also, if you don't have hosting capacities, just seed the yearly archives out as torrent files. I'm sure there are some nerds out there who will voluntarily build a frontend for that.

If everything was open access, then the memberships would have much less of a value proposition.

I've been a member since February 1971 (I was still in college), and signed up for the ACM Digital Library when it launched. So you can thank people like me for the existence of the ACM and the availability of all those papers that you can now read for free.

Thank you!

Yes, positive reinforcement is generally the most successful way to get people to do what you want.

I always wondered why they called their organization the Association for Computing Machinery. It sounds like an association for computers, not people.

Computers used to be people. Until the advent of electronic computers, computing machines were all mechanical or elecro-mechanical affairs. This was the world view of the founders.

Dating from the 1940s!

> The ACM was founded in 1947 under the name Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, which was changed the following year to the Association for Computing Machinery. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Computing_Mach...

Actually, Google Scholar pointed me to a 1933 example (!) at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1167450

> In the computing field, a number of technics have been reported (346, 348, 413) whereby correlations and other computations may be computed by means of standard computing machinery. Hull (373) described the most elaborate computing machine for making the almost interminable calculations utilized in the partial and multiple correlation technics for combining tests according to optimum weights.

along with other citations from the 1930s.

But the association isn't for the machinery. That day is still some ways off hopefully.

I don't think I understand your comment.

I think you (and criddell) are observing that the association is not composed of computing machines, but rather is composed of people - people who are interested in computing machines.

If so, it seems a not uncommon construction; hardly enough to even comment on.

The Association for Rural & Small Libraries" isn't composed of libraries, but people who work in, and/or are supportive of, rural and small libraries. - https://www.arsl.org/

The Association for Glycogen Storage Disease isn't composed of a disease, but is "an organization which would be a focus for parents of and individuals with glycogen storage disease", https://agsdus.org/ .

Am I missing something?

Computers used to be people, but machinery was never people.

Are there any gems in here that were previously unavailable?

Barbara Liskov "Programming with Abstract Data Types"

And basically all the CACM and ACM conferences paper. So like. 50 years of implementing stuff.

Here's a good place to start: https://amturing.acm.org/lectures.cfm

Go further, open it all.

tfa states an intention of doing so in the next 5 years.

This is big

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