Comment by yarapavan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yarapavan | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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