ACM Is Now Open Access | Hacker News Reader

ACM Is Now Open Access

acm.org

337 pointsleglock51 comments

Discussed extensively two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991 (243 comments)

As noted above, 'Fully Open Access' does not mean completely free. So, while this change is welcome, there are still a lot of pricing/licensing options:

Corporate https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/corporate-pri...

Government https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/government/dl...

Academic Institutions https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen

Individuals https://dl.acm.org/action/publisherEcommerceHelper?doi=10.55...

Also, the 'Basic Edition' provided for free to individuals without institutional/individual accounts, the ACM explains, does not include niceties such as 'Advanced Search' (e.g., filters), which requires an upgrade https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55017806873_c9ba2490c1_b...

Someone will probably build an external search index.

Let's do a "best of" ACM, to list everyone's favorite articles.

First thing that comes to mind for me are the series of articles presented at HOPL conferences, History of Programming Languages.

HOPL II (1993) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766

HOPL III (2007) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844

HOPL IV (2021) https://dl.acm.org/do/10.1145/event-12215/abs/

I love that I can now just drop the link to this gem:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165555.1165556

Aggregability is NP-Hard... Useful the next time someone insists that it's possible to find a "perfect" model for a non-trivial ML problem. (I get this ask 1-2 times per month.)

Where is HOPL I? Could only find this: https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8

The HOPL (1) book (ISBN 9780127450407 ) is at https://doi.org/10.1145/800025 (direct link to ACM: https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025 ) .

(As others have said, it's probably better to choose the doi.org URL over the dl.acm.org one in general. Three cheers for HOPL!)

OK, I made a post about it.

Ask HN: Favorite Articles in the ACM Digital Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460953

While it is free for readers, authors or author institutions still need to pay to publish the papers.

> Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

https://cc.acm.org/2026/open-access/

Given the current trends in publishing "productivity" that may not be a bad thing.

Is that … a bad thing? I know that peer reviewing takes time (although iirc journals don’t pay reviewers). And there is overhead around publishing which needs to be covered somehow.

Academic publishing is _notoriously_ profitable. Authorship and the bulk of the editorial process is done by others for free, and these days you often aren't even creating a physical copy. Their overheads are really pretty minimal. What the money (subscriptions and / or APCs) gets is the kudos associated with the publication.

It is reasonable to say: well if they aren't providing anything of value then the market ought to bypass them. The reality is that the publishers have been very canny in protecting their position, and sharp practice is rife.

Very bad. APC fees typically are much larger than overhead of publishing and publishers have extreme profit margins.

They charge a substantial premium for that service. The open access publication fees are typically hundreds or even thousands of dollars per article.

There are other platforms that can offer a similar service for much cheaper, but scientists incentivised to publish on established journals that have a higher impact metrics.

This is good, but they're now charging authors a publishing fee of over $1000 per article (and they say that that is the discounted price). It is unclear whether this is justified. In my experience publishing scientific articles with ACM, all the real work (such as peer review) is done by volunteers. From what I can tell, ACM just hosts the exact PDF + metadata that authors supply. I suspect that in the future, more journals and conferences will switch to an arXiv-overlay model.

I'm pretty sure the primary purpose of the $1000 is just to create some small gate to avoid overloading reviewers/ACM. There are probably other mechanisms that could be used - such as having "recommendations" for from already approved researchers - I think arXiv has something like that.

That isn't the case. Conferences organize their own website to submit articles for review. Volunteers from the conference pre-filter submitted articles for spam, the rest is handled by the review committee. There is no cost to submit. In fact, the eventual cost is often not even mentioned at that point. When the article is accepted for publication, the conference gives authors a link to an ACM website where the authors upload their PDFs. Only after that will the authors be asked to pay the fee (and if you wanted, you could refuse at that point, which presumably means that the conference will eat the loss, or maybe they'll un-publish your article).

I don't think spam is a huge issue. The conference websites and submission portals are niche and random people don't tend to find them or care enough to go through the trouble.

Not at all; the charge happens at the end of the proccess, after the article was reviewed and accepted for publication.

They charge that much because they can.

I have volunteered in various roles for ACM conferences and thus have some insight into ACM's path towards Open Access over the past years.

Just a few things to consider:

- ACM is not a for-profit publisher like Springer or Elsevier. Any profits made from their/our publishing activities subsidize e.g., outreach activities, travel stipends for developing countries, and potential losses from e.g. conferences. - In my experience, ACM is one of the very few publishers in computer science where you can generally trust the published papers. - Keeping a long-term digital library is not just "putting PDFs on a server" but involves a lot of additional costs. The ACM HQ is rather lean IMHO, but there are multiple people involved in developing the Digital Library, handling cases of copyright infringement and plagiarism, supporting volunteers, etc. Also, the ACM DL contains a rising number of video recordings of conference talks, etc. Additionally, there are several contractors to be paid. For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara. - In the past, subscriptions to the ACM Digital Library were a major, stable source of income for ACM. ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.

How does the arXiv manage the same feat for one tenth the cost?

It doesn't. arXiv is exclusively a pre-print service. The ACM digital library is for peer-reviewed, published papers. All of the peer-review happens through the ACM, as well as the physical conferences where people present and publish their papers.

The peer review is all done by volunteers of conferences, not ACM.

Yes, and that peer review happens through the ACM. It serves an organizing function. The conferences themselves are also in-person events, and most of the important research papers come out of those conferences.

I don’t see what the benefit of most of that is, and why publication fees are a good way to pay for it. Take video recordings: why should we pay for them to develop a video hosting platform when perfectly good ones exist? In fact, conferences that I am familiar with put the recordings on YouTube, and this works great.

> ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.

The attitude that the work of science belongs to these publishers is what grates me the most. Yes, ACM is not as bad as Elsevier, but this attitude is still fundamentally wrong. They are in the position they are mostly by historical accident, able to extract rents because it requires a lot of coordination to switch.

Why do I call it rent extraction despite the ACM doing stuff? Suppose the ACM charged separately for using their video platform. Would anyone pay for that?

> For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara

And what good is that? Why should we pay for a separate company to run pdflatex for us? The system exists primarily to check that we’ve put ACM branding in the paper.

Sometimes people also say that the real service is long term storage of pdfs, but let me preempt that right now: there are government sponsored long term storage facilities like Zenodo that are likely to outlast ACM. Second, commercial storage paid for indefinitely using an annuity would cost less than $1 in present value for hosting the pdfs of a conference, about 0.0001% of ACM publication fees.

> ACM will become one of the very few organizations to offer a large, integrated, and highly curated library of articles and related artifacts openly accessible to all

Is there anything specific about them doing that? Most of the publishers are now moving to open access model (where they charge authors thousands and still not paying for reviewers) so not sure about their claim here.

I was in academia for only a few years. I did a lot of reviewing (one of the chores for graduate students). I don't know what to say, here; there needs to be an economically based gate keeper for publication & review. Otherwise you'll get spammed by hundreds (per graduate student) of crazy-people papers. I was in a niche PL subfield (generic programming in the mid-2000s), and there was this one guy I called "guitar dude" that kept submitting PL papers using "guitar theory". The basis of the theory was an "algorithm" he developed to determine if a number was prime in O(1) (constant!!?) time in the size of the number. He was by far the most determined; he had a "swap" scam he ran to get his papers in. OTOH, submissions to the editor (my PI) numbered in the THOUSANDS, and we only had, like, 35 attendees at GPCE? I can't imagine what Nature or Science have to deal with.

I don't know how submission works for non-Western subsidized countries; but, just wading through the pre-AI submission process was a 50+-hour a week job for one, tiny, niche conference. Making the cost $1000 cuts that down by at least 2 orders of magnitude.

On the flip side ... paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea? Reviewers need to be skeptical AF. Even the best scientists can throw out turds every now and then.

> paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea? Reviewers need to be skeptical AF

Sorry, it's not obvious to me - how might payment for reviewers affect their decision making?

Let's be real: graduate students are not paid well. Even a modest payment scheme would be a dramatic boost in their income. What payment schedule would you use for review? By paper? By journal? If it's "by paper" then the students will be motivated to churn through the papers to get paid. I'm not sure what the incentive structure is there, but it doesn't sound right.

I guess the journals could turn around and pay the PI? But, then what? The "reviewers" still aren't being paid; just the PI? The incentive then is for the PI to have as many grad students as possible just reviewing papers. (FREE. MONEY.) If there was ever a dynamic I've been in where one agent doesn't need MORE power, it's the PI-grad-student one.

And, I've not even considered (in depth) the Bad Actors™ in such a situation. I'm just thinking about basic humans humaning along...

Interesting, thanks for the reply. I wasn't aware grad students were so heavily involved in the review process, thought it was more postdocs.

PostDocs review the review. PI's sign off on PD's to make sure they're not idiots. Only big labs have enough PD's to let them do reviews. And, for sure, in CS there's almost no big labs. I was under Bjarne Stroustrup, and the larger umbrella group was probably 40ish staff, in total. That'd be: 3 lead PIs (Bjarne, Nancy, Lawrence); there were a small core of assistant profs (Jaakko, Gabi, etc. — maybe 4 or 5 of them?) There were no PD's: just 25ish grad students, and then a rotating stable of undergrads. We were extremely well funded (JP Morgan, MSFT, the fed).

Our "sister" lab over in computational biology had a few PD's, but was 2x as big, and had easily 5x the funding.

Cool, thanks for the perspective.

Great news. They temporarily opened it in 2020 during the pandemic. I argued it should remain so in a post: https://www.scott-a-s.com/acm-digital-library-should-remain-.... I'm glad it's finally happened.

This is a great start, but it is not enough.

We need to keep pushing for other journals, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, to be open access and free for all.

I'm not sure "open access" in this context actually means, err, that the access is actually open.

What do you mean? Open access means exactly what it says.

IEEE may do it, as it's a professional organization. That is, they're a non-profit dedicated to the furtherance of the field. Being open access fits their mission, and the costs can be handled by dues and fees. Springer and Elsevier are for-profit publishers. I don't know how if they can have an open-access business model.

Available to read is not open access. Sadly publishers have completely subverted the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access. It's about rights, not allowed to read the text.

For anyone else wondering what the definition in Budapest Open Access Initiative is:

> 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/

Finally. This might have a material impact on improving professional standards in the industry.

Here’s the actual link to content https://dl.acm.org/

This is great news and really makes me want to submit to ACM over IEEE.

They are both hosted on the same platform, which is owned by John Wiley & Sons.

But IEEE is not open access entirely now too, right? Or am I misunderstanding?

I don't know, not everyone has adopted open access, indeed. Nor do they necessarily plan to. But I don't work there anymore, thankfully.

More fodder for LLMs? I don't think humans are going to directly consume all that text.

Most researchers publish their papers to arxiv anyway which LLMs can freely access.

Don't they already train on the shadow libraries?

and at the same time paywalled metadata https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-o...

This is lame, but always remember that OpenAlex exists and is completely free:

https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.so...

Imagine a world where you can click on references in your paper and have them immediately come up, like the rest of the web. This can be done today:

Always provide a DOI-style link, for example: https://doi.org/10.1088/0029-5515/30/2/001

These can be easily changed to actual working links with a simple browser substitution rule: replace the "doi.org" with "sci-hub.se" or whatever.

Kudos. I wonder how long it took to 1) decide this move, 2) actually migrate their system

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