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Comment by lsuresh | Hacker News Reader

USENIX and their conferences were the absolute best to publish with. You as a researcher focus on submitting papers and/or being part of the PC. They help organize the whole conference instead of depending on an army of volunteers (you won't see "general chairs" and "local chairs" unlike with ACM). And all papers were open access without even needing a login: you literally just click the PDF from the conference website.

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Many USENIX papers are not open access, despite being available by literally just clicking the PDF from the conference website. (See the definition in https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration.) This is not for any nefarious reason; a lot of them predate the general understanding of why open-access licensing was important, as well as Creative Commons's founding.

You'll note, for example, that https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... bears no license of any kind, and the unfortunate fact is that under current copyright law is that random people redistributing copies of the paper is by default illegal.

It's the first time I'm hearing about the Berlin Declaration. :)

Perhaps the first time you'd heard of it directly, but you used the term "open access" as if everyone were familiar with it, so you'd apparently been hearing about it indirectly for many years.

It's almost like that declaration doesn't have the impact you seem to think it does.

Open access means just that to most people, not free reign to do whatever you like with the content as the hosting piece isn't all that relevant.

The impact of that declaration is that people today are talking about "open access" and moving to open-access publishing models, and new ACM articles are being published as CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND.

Most people don't have any idea what we're talking about; if you asked most people what Kosaraju's algorithm was, how an absorption refrigerator worked, or who the Four Hundred were in the Gilded Age, they also wouldn't have anything sensible to say. In https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9 they found that less than half of college students in the USA knew the name of the capital of Iraq, which was currently full of US troops. And in https://youtu.be/ZjGd1F1Xk8w?t=18 you can see lots of random people who don't know what "WWW" stands for and think Asia is a country.

Talking about "open access" without knowing about the Berlin Declaration at the heart of that movement is the same kind of ignorance.

I am currently the publication chair of a ACM SIGCHI conference and actually all the work is managed by by Sheridan publishing for ACM. The process is really streamlined. The main paper track actually is now a journal since a few years, so it is mostly getting the flea circus of 30 workshops and other adjunct papers to meet their deadlines. We are still under the old syste, so I wonder what the effect of the new system will be as some universities prepay the fees, while others require the authors to do that per paper afaik.

Your work played an influential part in my (brief) academic journey. Didn't think I would read your username here lol, thank you so much!