ACM Digital Library Archive is Open Access with 50 Years of Published Records | Hacker News Reader

ACM Digital Library Archive is Open Access with 50 Years of Published Records

dl.acm.org

473 pointsyarapavan51 comments

Announcement: https://associationsnow.com/2022/05/the-way-things-were-why-...

...as a part of its landmark campaign for its 75th anniversary celebrations, ACM is opening up a large portion of its archives, making the first 50 years of its published records—more than 117,500 documents dating from 1951 to 2000—accessible to the public without a login.

* A paper from the inaugural issue of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software in 1975: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/355626.355636

* The UNIX time-sharing system by Ritchie & Thompson. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800009.808045

* A Conversation with Steve Jobs. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/63334.63336

Edit: More info -

In January 2020, ACM launched an ambitious five-year plan to transition the Association into an Open Access Publisher. The foundation of that plan is a new model called ACM Open, which asks research institutions around the world to underwrite the costs of publication for their affiliated authors. Over the past two years, nearly 200 research institutions have already signed on to ACM Open and ACM is fast approaching the first major milestone for the transition, when approximately 20% of ACM's newly published articles are Open Access upon publication in the ACM Digital Library.

Source: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/5/260362-thanks-for-the-...

The link for "The UNIX time-sharing system" only provides a 1-page PDF of the abstract. I believe the correct PDF is located at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361011.361061

It wasn't clear to me by looking at the pages themselves. I hope usability will not be a huge issue and negate the benefit of this open access!

Hey, the author of the piece. For context here: I included the link to the 1973 abstract rather than the 1974 document because it was the first mention of UNIX in the ACM archive, which I made clear in the piece but got a little lost in the comment here.

50 years of SIGGRAPH, looking forward to it ;)

Sort of. For most production related content in the ACM library, you'll still only get the abstracts.

SIGGRAPH is behind the times. SIGCOMM has been open access for years.

It's a shame too since SIGGRAPH runs ACM's most popular conference(s) with many thousands of attendees and high registration fees ($875 "discounted" pregistration for a virtual conference? are you kidding?) and can almost certainly afford the negligible costs for digital publication.

Well here's hoping we'll get real open access for everything by ... 2025. ;-/

Until then: google scholar, sci-hub, or donate your $99 to ACM.

I remember reading up on Karp's 21 problems paper and encountering the paper from Cook that established that boolean satisfiability was NP complete. It was published in ACM, very glad that it's available now: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800157.805047

Hey, can we get a mod to update the headline? I think the lack of info about the time period is confusing people about what’s available and what’s not. (I wrote the announcement piece linked here, FYI.)

Off topic but does anyone happen to know why the announcement page returns a 403 when accessed from a command line browser (lynx)?

Spoofing useragent works. From the look of it, it's a nginx-generated 403, which probably means they hardcoded their nginx config to block web clients they don't consider good webcitizens.

The string they're blocking isn't [Ll]ynx, it's libwww. Which Lynx has in its user agent string. They're not blocking wget or curl.

It's probably a misguided attempt to block custom written bots, maybe a particular one they've had trouble with in the past.

I don't mean this negatively at all but I am daydreaming of a time machine and taking this decision back to 1995 and tripping over all the technology fads we might have been spared. Good. This is what makes it worth having children for.

> asks research institutions around the world to underwrite the costs of publication for their affiliated authors

The actual marginal cost for a digital publication is negligible, as demonstrated by arxiv.org, archive.org, and sci-hub.

The reason why ACM and IEEE charge so much for digital library access is that they use the money for unrelated purposes.

Publication in an ACM journal involves a lot more than just accepting a paper as-is.

Yes, it involves reviews by other experts in the field. Are those reviewers being paid by ACM?

While peer review isn’t perfect - it’s helpful. Arxiv isn’t peer reviewed. Most things in ACM journals and conferences are. That process costs money because it takes people and time to do it well. Journal subscriptions are often not enough to recover those costs.

As for sci-hub? They’re just taking the finished work. It’s like saying software shouldn’t cost much because The Pirate Bay can deliver software for free.

The reviewers don't get paid for doing the reviews in the peer review system..

I don't think the authors get paid either. So, no pay to authors nor reviewers. Does the editorial board get paid? Perhaps not.

> > That process costs money because it takes people and time to do it well. Journal subscriptions are often not enough to recover those costs.

Some of the items left to consider here are actually putting together the reviewed papers and publishing them. I would say the cost of these two items has gone down with the extended use of computers over the last 3 decades.

What other items are left? It would be interesting to know.

Unrelated to the narrow task of file hosting, but entirely related to the missions of those nonprofit organizations. Some of the fees go towards the cost for hosting subsequent iterations of the very conferences the papers were presented at

Nice - this means the May 1988 issue of CACM is freely available. That's notable because the cover article is Cliff Stoll's "Stalking the Wily Hacker" [1], with the material that later became his book "The Cuckoo's Egg". But I've still got the dead-tree version of that issue around somewhere in storage because of another article, by Andrew Appel and Guy Jacobson, "The World's Fastest Scrabble Algorithm" [2]. I coded that up back then, in Pascal IIRC, and had a blast doing so.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/42411.42412

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/42411.42420

So some people already posted now-accessible papers that worth a look. Here is my random pick: "A relational model of data for large shared data banks" [1]

It's a defining paper for RDB data model. I think it's not a exaggeration to say all the RDB history starts here. (The history itself is covered not by acm but by ieee [2]).

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362384.362685

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16074372884446179...

And interestingly enough such a landmark paper got rejected initially: http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/reject.html

This is a very interesting page. Could you provide some context for it? Are there more like it? What were the roles of Santini and Fang respectively in assembling the content?

In 1975, my high school's "Independent Science Study" class took a field trip to the Crerar Library at the U of Chicago[1]. In the stacks was a paper on AI that changed my life[2].

It was a 3 hour drive, each way. Now it takes 3 seconds.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/h3xCccBMQDBqQXhD7

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1460833.1460840

I worked as a librarian there in the early 70's. It was a different world!

This is a treasure chest of computer-related papers from 1951 - 2000. The topics span the full breadth of computing, including topics that might not immediately come to mind.

An example: I posted a 1984 paper about end-user documentation for all types of users (including developers) from the ACM archive. Despite the age of the paper, you'll recognise the questions about documentation even today.

'Those silly bastards': A report on some users' views of documentation (1984) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31003306

Documentation and user interface face the same issues.

The biggest mistake engineers make is to expose the internal workings of the software in ways irrelevant to the user.

The biggest mistake marketing makes is to focus on upselling. I believe this is the reason why Google beat out Yahoo in the search space.

It would appear this isn't a time-limited thing:

> Vicki L. Hanson, the group’s CEO, noted that the ACM Digital Library initiative is part of a broader effort to make its archives available via open access by 2025.

> “Our goal is to have it open in a few years, but there’s very real costs associated with [the open-access work],” Hanson said. “We have models so that we can pay for it.”

USENIX has been open access for years. Some ACM conferences and journals (e.g. SIGCOMM/CCR) have been open access for several years.

One step that ACM could take that wouldn't require any technical changes to their existing infrastructure would be to officially offer republication and redistribution rights to any non-commercial digital library including arxiv.org, archive.org, sci-hub, etc..

Wow, this is great! I'm happy to see "Connection Machine Lisp: Fine-Grained Parallel Symbolic Processing"[0] in here, free at last. I actually bought that paper in my undergrad CS days just because it's so intriguing (IMHO).

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/319838.319870

Ah, cool, a paper I wrote back in 1985 is now open access. It only took 37 years.

Well, at least I can send my kid (recent CS grad) a link and he can laugh at what was doing almost 40 years ago. Robotics then wasn't what it is today!

You should link to the paper so we can all laugh!

I don't think I could survive such a calamitous event in my life.

I was young and thought I knew a lot more than I actually did. My Physics professor at the time encouraged me to publish the paper based on some work I had been doing in robotics under his supervision.

This was the 1980's, you couldn't go buy Arduinos and cheap I/O boards, etc. I had to design everything and build every single board by hand (wire-wrapped, if anyone knows what that is). It was a ridiculous amount of work but it was awesome. Oh, yeah, and machine my own parts, no 3D printing!

What's interesting is that I actually got a meeting with and an employment offer from a large multinational corporation based on this paper. So, not horrible, at least in the context of the times.

It's sad that we still need scihub for the research already paid in many cases by the taxpayers.

So scihub FTW!

Do we have to register on the site to get download access? I found something from 1963 I'd like to download but there's no download link[0]. I'm sure I must be making a mistake. I found the article through the dl.acm.org search engine.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1147/rd.24.0289

That's not published in an ACM venue, but that page has a link with the DOI, https://doi.org/10.1147/rd.24.0289, that takes you to the IEEE page with a download link.

I appreciate you including the DOI link in your comment. I like the fact that ACM has released some articles but as someone not entirely familiar with all the different ACM publications I am unsure as to how to sufficiently limit my search query to find downloadable articles. Perhaps they will add a specific "open access" filter to their search (I unsuccessfully tried searching "open access" but perhaps none of the articles are indexed by their availability). Thank you very much.

> ACM has opened more than 117,500 articles published between 1951 and the end of 2000, during the first 50 years of its publishing program.

Up to end of 2000, so it appears there's still residual value in holding Lifetime Membership[1]. This is nevertheless a huge leap in the right direction.

Here's to hoping ACM applies some funds toward maintaining the DL mobile app, which hasn't seen an update in like 5 years.

[1] https://www.acm.org/membership/lifetime-membership

Its very nice that they made all those articles available. But it is definitely not 50 years of published records made Open Access. OA mirrors FOSS software in some ways and the users need many of the same freedoms. Just making them available to read with the same old copyright still attach is not enough.

The Budapest Declaration from 2002 that defined OA for the first time states it very clearly:

  "By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/

Good points, but what is the copyright?

As a student I've often used their DL. I really had a bunch of great resources.

Original announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30944881

I'm an ACM member. I just searched, and it still costs $5 to read recent articles. And that's with a membership. But good on them for opening access to older materials.

I think your membership is just for the ACM itself, and doesn't include the Digital Library[0]. My membership includes the DL (for an extra $99/yr) and I have access to all recent articles.

[0] https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options

All of the articles that I have searched/browsed are requiring login / payment... am I missing something?

Now, if we could only get the IEEE onboard with open access.

I just searched for something at random, selected the first search hit, and since I am no longer a member of the ACM, there was a $15 charge to read the article.

It says that open access only covers articles from 1951 to 2000.

You can change the search to only search from 1951 to 2000 on the left sidebar.

An immense benefit to the technical community..thanks a lot

Is there a way to filter by number of reads popularity? Number of citations?

Yes, search results can be sorted by citations.

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