CACM Is Now Open Access
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
Changing the economic basis of a thriving industry is a enormous challenge (how long has open source software been around?). ACM has publically committed to making all its content open-access by 2026 (https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess). I'm still waiting to hear Microsoft or Facebook make a similar commitment (-:.
It has taken years because the worldwide research community must change from the "readers and libraries pay" model to "writers pay." For ACM, the transition is well underway. Many ACM conferences are now open access, and I'm happy to say that CACM is now fully open access as well (previously, it was just the older issues).
Opening CACM's content and creating a new website was a deliberate decision to try to make CACM into a central forum for the technical community to exchange ideas and debate issues. ACM is well aware that this community is orders of magnitude larger than its membership, so opening access to its flagship publication is an essential first step.
There are many technical websites and blogs online; most are focused on specific topics and areas or intended for readers who may not have a technical background. CACM's remit is computing in general, and we assume our readers are technically literate.
Please contribute (https://cacm.acm.org/author-guidelines/). CACM offers a range of options: informal blog posts, short Viewpoint pieces, and longer Research and Practice articles. We would like to hear from you!
I have been complaining in probably a not to effectual way over the past 15 years about this. I'd like to think in some small part, I helped in this endeavor, but I am no butterfly.
It is intellectually honest, that everyone on earth should have access to this material. The garden is available to all.
Thank you ACM!
There are many seminal papers in the older issues, and it's only right that they finally, again, be accessible for everyone!!!
As an aside, I encourage everyone learning or at least struggling with a new subject to check its first papers, they often clarify it better than anything else (and are usually less complex than you'd expect)
Papers from before 2000 have been freely available since May 2022 (https://associationsnow.com/2022/07/the-way-things-were-why-..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31447465)
Amazing anyhow.
It would also be cool to hear from HNers who have papers on there. I’m adding this just in case you aren’t comfortable including yourself on a top three list.
I did that and found a paper I would rank highly: Hoare’s “An axiomatic basis for computer programming”[1].
I clicked through and saw that it was included in their 25th anniversary issue and that particular issue seems like an excellent place to start.[2]
IIRC, he always said that any OA model for ACM requires careful thinking about a sustainable business model.
In 2009 he argued [1]:
> "Indeed, the idea of unfettered access to scientific knowledge naturally resonates with many researchers, including me. So why doesn’t ACM become an open-access publisher? [...] ACM operates as a democratic association. If you believe that ACM should change its publishing business model, then you should lobby for this position. [...] The second issue is the business model of association publishing, for example, "reader pays" vs. "authors pays." This is a legitimate topic of discussion, as long as we understand that it cannot be separated from the overall business model of the association. Just remember, "free" is not a sound business model."
In 2018 he wrote [2]:
> "If we are serious about open access, then we must discuss its underlying business model. Let’s get serious about open access!"
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/open-closed-or-clopen-access/
And thank you Alexandra Elbakyan because I'm sure you were a factor in this decision even if ACM won't admit it.
Slow way: Click archive, navigate to the issue, select PDF.
Faster way: On the right hand side (desktop) there's a vertical bar with some buttons click the circled i, then "Issue's Table of Contents". Takes you to the issue's page and you can get the PDf.
Making it open access makes perfect sense and can only increase scientific engagement and distribution.
I used to pay for membership because I enjoyed perusing the print edition of CACM. I loved the opportunities for serenditipy that it created merely by being on my coffee table. The digital edition doesn't have that. It requires conscious effort to go check out the website.
If you have ideas for how to improve CACM, the editor-in-chief (Jim Larus) is highly receptive. He's interested in increasing the value of CACM for industry professionals, researchers, and students, and in increasing membership in ACM.
For example, one idea I've shared with him is to make CACM the main gateway for all of ACM content. You'll note that the new CACM has an "Explore Topics" menu at the top, which lists areas like Architecture, HCI, Security and Privacy. My suggestion was to make this a feed for all relevant ACM content, including SIG newsletters that ACM already publishes, paper award winners, recent journal articles, blog posts, etc.
Perhaps it might be useful to get feedback by asking some questions. If you are a member of ACM, what do you find most valuable about it? And if you aren't a member, given that you're on HN and likely interested in a lot of content and conferences that ACM offers, why not? What could ACM do differently or what could it offer that would make membership valuable to you?
They are, though. This announcement is about CACM becoming fully open access, but it's also a bit of a "progress report" on opening up the archive.
>> By the end of 2023, approximately 40% of the ~26,000 articles ACM publishes annually were being published Open Access utilizing the ACM Open model. As ACM has progressed toward this goal, it has increasingly opened large parts of the ACM Digital Library, including more than 100,000 articles published between 1951–2000. It is ACM’s plan to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when the transition to full Open Access is complete.
is there a simple answer to 'what's the license'? i'd like to understand:
- how effectively libraries' rights to archive, copy, and redistribute works published in cacm is protected;
- whether the license is compatible with incorporation of text into wikipedia and stack overflow; and
- to what extent volunteer translations into languages such as chinese and spanish can be legally archived, copied, and redistributed
as i understand the term 'open access' (https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration) the answer should be 'irrevocably', 'not necessarily', and 'completely', but i'd like confirmation that the acm isn't using 'open access' in an incompatible way. the berlin declaration specifies
> The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
i mean i see https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/acmopen#model but i'm not seeing answers to those questions in it; it's more about how acm gets paid than about what licenses are being granted to the public
For new OA publications at conferences/journals, authors get a choice of CC licenses [1,2]. The respective licenses can be found in an article's [3] "Information" sidebar (hidden by default) or the HTML/PDF version [4]. Unfortunately, the licenses are apparently not shown more prominently in the ACM Digital Library. The search function does not allow filtering by license either.
For CACM articles, the traditional ACM copyright notice seems to apply [5] (maybe there are CC-licensed articles, but I did not see any so far):
"Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author."
For pre-OA publications (< ~2020 ?), authors could either transfer copyright or give ACM a publishing license [3]. I'd assume that ACM may assign an arbitrary CC license to publications to which they own the copyright but not to ones for which they only have publishing rights. Given that authors only licensed publishing rights for the final article to ACM, I'd guess the only acceptable CC license in this case would be CC-BY-ND.
However, I guess that ACM won't want to go through the trouble of assigning CC licenses to older publications.
EDIT:
My tentative guesses/answers to your questions would be:
> - how effectively libraries' rights to archive, copy, and redistribute works published in cacm is protected;
IIRC, libraries subscribing to ACM's DL already have the right to archive the content. Given that many authors have only given ACM the right to distribute their works, I'm not sure whether scraping OA articles is allowed. (ACM has been banning IP ranges for mass-downloading papers in the past, so be careful.)
> - whether the license is compatible with incorporation of text into wikipedia and stack overflow; and
IMHO, only if a non-ND CC license was applied to the article. Also, correct attribution is still needed [7].
> - to what extent volunteer translations into languages such as chinese and spanish can be legally archived, copied, and redistributed
Again, probably only for explicitly CC-licensed content (excluding -ND).
[1] https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/publication-rights...
[2] https://cfiesler.medium.com/acm-copyright-licenses-which-sho...
[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623509.3633366
[4] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3623509.3633366
[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624717 (sidebar)
[6] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14734/which-acm...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Creative_Commons_text...
in the united states today, universities can no longer take advantage of the research exemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption to patents because madey v. duke held that, by using madey's patented invention for research purposes, duke was 'increas[ing] the status of the institution and lur[ing] lucrative research grants', so a sneaky lawyer hired by a hypothetical future cacm administration could argue that things like archiving the cacm articles in a university library could produce 'commercial advantage' for the university, so it would be nice to have the acm using language that protects users' rights more solidly
also, i feel like having the notice hidden by default makes it unnecessarily difficult to comply with, since the notice requires that copies 'bear this notice (...) on the first page'. unlike older cacm publications, the pdf of that article produced by the acm also doesn't bear the notice on the first page, or in fact anywhere, so you have to modify the pdf to be able to copy it in compliance with the conditions of the notice
cc-by-nd or similar licenses are clearly not compliant with the definition of 'open access' in the berlin declaration. you may be correct that acm doesn't have the legal ability to license the creation of derivative works of older articles unless the author or other copyright holder had transferred copyright to the acm. that would make those older articles not open access, and obtaining the necessary licenses might be logistically infeasible at this point by any measure short of drastically reducing the term of copyright through legislation
so it seems like the acm is improving the situation considerably, but there's still a long way to go
AFAIK, licensing agreements between libraries and digital publishers typically include a right to perpetual access to articles in a journal or digital library they subscribe to. Any papers published while the licensing agreement is in place are to be made available even if the library cancels their subscription. This also includes the right to make backup copies of the digital library.
(Here's such an agreement between ACM and the Norwegian universities: https://www.openscience.no/media/3449/download?inline )
What the library is allowed to do with this backup probably depends on country-specific laws.
However, if I understand the current situation correctly, ACM allows everyone to download CACM articles but not to redistribute them, right?
In theory, they could also explicitly allow anyone to redistribute all of their publications (they reserve the right to do this in the licensing agreement with authors). However, I'd argue that it is not in ACMs interest to do so - and probably not in mine, either. Having a central, trustworthy source has benefits - e.g. when retracting papers. I'm fine with the ACM DL being free to use and having library backups as safety nets if ACM ever goes under.
i agree that it's beneficial to have a central, trustworthy source. if redistributing cacm articles is clearly legal, and the acm goes under, you'll get them from the internet archive, wikisource, project gutenberg, google's new historical acm article archive, or some similar institution. if redistributing cacm articles is not clearly legal, you'll have to get them from library genesis, sci-hub, or the pirate bay, with the associated risks of incorrect contents—but only until those get shut down following a change of government
well, maybe you personally won't, because you have a position at a university, and you can easily just use its library. but the people you'd like to have as your students 20 years from now, people who are now living here in argentina or in ukraine or egypt, will have to get them from there
an additional issue is that, in many cases, the 'central trustworthy source' does a really bad job of scanning paper documents: they use bilevel scanning for photographs (sometimes even color photographs), scan at very low resolution, chop off the pages, and so forth. i run into these constantly; https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a17/A17_LunarRover2.html is probably the most recent example. although allowing other people to scan their copies and distribute the scans does not ensure that they will correct this problem, prohibiting them from doing so reduces the chances further
analogous remarks apply to translation
and that's why the berlin declaration enshrines the right for readers to redistribute works and derivative works as central to open access
In 2019 there was a big dustup when people thought Trump was going to issue an executive order requiring all federally-funded research to be open access. ACM as an organization signed a letter with a bunch of publishers opposing this idea. It's own membership (myself included) objected pretty strongly... and the next year ACM announced plans to move to open access. So, just maybe, they're actually listening to their members.
However, arXiv has done a lot for open access publishing, so perhaps it wouldn't have happened (this early) had it not been for arXiv.
They plan to make the entire digital library freely accessible by January 1, 2026.
Here's a short article about timeline and implications: https://medium.com/sigchi/about-acm-open-cd544408559c
EDIT: for anyone wondering why there need to be APCs at all, Jonathan Aldrich gives a glimpse into costs and benefits of 'traditional' publishers: https://medium.com/sigchi/what-benefits-do-traditional-publi...
This is amazing, I hadn't been following recently!!!
P.S., I was going to show some examples, but the latest issue of CACM does have more research-related articles than my impression with the past issues, so I could be wrong....