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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see a similar effort directed towards the IEEE and Acm publishing associations. They both leech off of publicly funded research and impede scientific and technological progress with their myriad paywalls.

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They are professional organizations, not just publishers. As professional organizations, their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the field. They may not always have paywalls; unlike Elsivier, their organization exists for purposes other than getting money from publications.

The co-chairs of the ACM Publishing Board recently wrote an editorial, "Positioning ACM for an Open Access Future": http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-...

It's not enough, but it's a start, and I'm hopeful. I am a member of both the ACM and IEEE, and I want both of these organizations to move to a fully open access model.

If their primary goal is to support members and the betterment of their field, then why are they impeding the sharing of information amongst said members and the public at large, not only with recent research but legacy papers from the 80s? My guess is that the organizations have evolved into self-serving fat bureaucratic fiefdoms.

Elsevier and other large publishers publish many journals on behalf of societies, so the distinction between the interests of professional organisations and publishers doesn't really work.

I think there is a clear distinction: Elsivier cannot go to an open access model, because it would cease to exist from lack of revenue, while the ACM and IEEE can continue to exist with an open access model because of membership dues.

The ACM already makes a lot more on conferences than dues, I think.

>their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the field

Their primary goal is securing a nice remuneration for the members of their board.

I've been in this field for a long time and I want to see these organizations disappear. We don't need them (anymore).

Those on the IEEE board get paid? That surprises me, although I could believe it -- do you have a cite?

FWIW, ACM has something called ACM Authorizer that enables authors to post links to their papers so that others can read them without paying any charges to ACM.

http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service

You can already post your articles yourself, the Authorizer just helps you plug into the DL bookkeeping. And what's the point? What value do we realy get from the Digital Library these days? Its a feature that requires critical mass to be useful, and the fact that it is exclusive means it will never have critical mass.

Check out the latest CACM article on the open access issue:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-...

I think the ACM is pretty much in denial at this point.

IEEE and ACM are supposedly democratic organisations. The way to change them is from the inside: get a core group of members on-side, put candidates up for election and start building support among the membership.

Reading around, there's at least some movement on the open-access front in the IEEE. IEEE allows authors to pay a hefty up-front free to make their paper "open-access" [1] and one of the candidates in the last election has the words "open-access" in his statement [2].

[1] http://theinstitute.ieee.org/briefings/business/ieee-expands...

[2] http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/election/2012candidates....

Edit: grammar

This is why there is http://articleak.allalla.com/

Also /r/scholar on Reddit. Some very helpful folks there.

>off of

Yeah. Mayhap 'from' would be a proper fealty to the god of english language parsimony, in substitution.

"Off of" is one of my pet peeves as well. Unfortunately, its usage is legitimate, if sometimes unpopular.

"Off of used to be standard in English; the MWDEU starts off with a Shakespearean usage [1592] and continues with Pepys [1668] and Bunyan [1678]. In the last century, they show it used by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Harry Truman, among others. So if it is making a comeback, it’s no harbinger of linguistic doom, just a return to form."

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/on-off-of/

Why is it a pet peeve of yours? Do you have a reason you could explain our does it just rub you the wrong way?

I guess my reasons are the same as those described in the link above, i.e. it is a matter of dialect, my own dialect of English doesn't use "off of" and it sounds ridiculous to my ears; it produces a similar reaction to being confronted with mis-use of there/their/they're.

However, English is a very ill-behaved language, and "off of" just happens to be one of its irritating aspects I'll have to put up with.

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