Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

this is great news

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

IIUC, it's complicated.

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...

thanks, this is great information! it's good to see that in the "information" sidebar (visible by clicking the circled i icon at the top of the right toolbar) they've removed the language about redistributing to lists or posting on servers. but "commercial advantage", especially now that they've removed "direct", seems like it could pose a lot of risks

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

Thanks for the information!

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.

it's definitely in acm's interest to do so if they want to claim they're 'open access', and it's in your interest too

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

Good points, thanks!

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