Hacker News Reader

Comment by Irishsteve | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the big tech companies do this. Yahoo and Microsoft would be particularly active in terms of publications. Google are more secretive but do publish. IBM obviously publish a lot as well. Others that come to mind Ebay , Linkedin, HP / Compaq (Weh), various big online chinese companies, and so on.

http://labs.yahoo.com http://research.microsoft.com http://research.google.com

View on HN

Microsoft research is especially amazing. Not only do they publish papers on their systems like Google and Facebook, they also do a lot of basic science on a very diverse set of topics.

The research talks are also worth checking out: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=vi...

The latest talks range from "Culture differences between US and China" to "Distributed Optimization via Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers".

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf

Yep: http://data.linkedin.com/publications

Hmm... interesting. I was about to make a comment about how IBM had moved a lot of their stuff behind the IEEE paywall, as a couple of weeks ago I went looking for some IBM publication and could only find it in IEEE Explore, and something I read led me to believe that all issues of IBM Systems Journal and IBM Journal of Research and Development were now only to be found at IEEE. But I looked again just now, and it appears that most (maybe all) issues of both journals are, in fact, still freely available. Weird.

Not sure if I saw an old page, or if something has changed in the past couple of weeks, or what, but at least for now, it appears that a significant body of IBM research material is still freely available.

And to make it even more confusing, I now see that some links from http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/ redirect to the IEEE site, but the actual article is still freely downloadable. Not sure how universal that is, as the article I was trying to access a couple of weeks ago, was very much not available for free (at the time). Weird. shrug

Regardless of what IEEE or IBM are doing, in academia those who know what open access actually is support it, and those who don't have mostly been disregarding closed-access rules made by publishers.

Tools like CiteSeerX can help you find archived copies of papers around the Internet, which may mean that you will not have to contend with paywalls at all to read the papers you want. For example, Tomasulo's famous paper about out-of-order execution originally published in the IBM J. Research has an entry here http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.129.... and you can note that it is available on several academics' personal sites, presumably uploaded originally for pedagogical purposes. As well, CiteSeerX keeps a cache of quite a few citations locally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com