'Communications of the ACM' Is Now Open Access (acm.org) 25
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: CACM [Communications of the ACM] Is Now Open Access," proclaims the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in its tear-down-this-CACM-paywall announcement. "More than six decades of CACM's renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library."
Ironically, clicking on Google search results for older CACM articles on Aaron Swartz currently returns page-not-found error messages and the CACM's own search can't find Aaron Swarz either, so perhaps there's some work that remains to be done with the transition to CACM's new website. ACM plans to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when its five-year transition to full Open Access is complete (January 2026 target date).
"They are right..." the site's editor-in-chief told Slashdot. "We need to get Google to reindex the new site ASAP."
Ironically, clicking on Google search results for older CACM articles on Aaron Swartz currently returns page-not-found error messages and the CACM's own search can't find Aaron Swarz either, so perhaps there's some work that remains to be done with the transition to CACM's new website. ACM plans to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when its five-year transition to full Open Access is complete (January 2026 target date).
"They are right..." the site's editor-in-chief told Slashdot. "We need to get Google to reindex the new site ASAP."
Reality of Academic Journals (Score:1)
How many of the 600,000 ACM articles have a citation count more than 10. Can I exclude the thousands (tens? / hundreds?) of thousands of ACM articles which are never cited or only cited a couple of times?
If you exclude self-citations or PHD candidate citing the papers for their academic department, how many of the ACM articles have more than 10 citations?
A history trove (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall reading the ACM now and then since the '70s. Membership was always beyond my means but there were libraries and various government agencies where i worked.
Interesting, scholarly articles, but I can't think of a single one I ever read that actually helped me with my work.
Does anyone here have a story about an ACM article that they actually used as part of job?
Re:A history trove (Score:4, Informative)
The late Franklin DeRemer's 1971 paper "Simple LR(k) Grammars" for one. I had a summer course from him and several years later used the paper as reference in writing an SLR(1) parser generator in a commercial project. DeRemer, Simple LR (k) Grammars [acm.org].
I used to eagerly await the arrival of CACM, but either my interests changed, or CACM went through a phase of concentrating more upon academic curriculum and funding than upon recent technical developments (which moved to a decreasingly affordable proliferation of specialty journals). Also, CACM moved from being beautifully typeset, to eye-destroying ragged-right.
Re: (Score:3)
Wow! Bravo! When I saw the announcement, I immediately thought: "Now, I'll be able to see Frank(lin) Deremer's SLR CACM paper". I had to be content with a smudgy copy of his Phd thesis. I'm delighted to see someone else remembering this landmark paper.
Re:A history trove (Score:4, Informative)
In the past, I've found ACM articles useful primarily in three ways: 1. An independent source of research to help confirm or refute claims of the benefits of "hot" technology (Generative AI, for instance [acm.org]), 2. An roundup and explanation of some of the research/theory behind techniques employed in software [acm.org] from both a user and developer perspective, 3. An early look a promising technology [acm.org] currently in the R&D stages. I'd imagine academic types find ACM publications (reading and publishing) much more valuable than the rest of us as far as advancing their careers goes.
That being said, with the shift in breakthrough technologies from more independent and open university and college research CS labs to tech giants and startups, as well as the Open Access fees [acm.org] the ACM plans to charge universities/colleges and paper authors to help maintain their revenue stream ($66 million in 2022), one wonders what kind of content ACM publications will offer in the future.
Re: (Score:2)
So what is ACM? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember that old dialog here on Slashdot:
- OMG, you don't know what ACM is?!
- Isn't it a scam? When I click on any link, it asks me for money. Just like ExpertSexChange.com.
...
Honestly, I still have no idea what ACM is.
But they can't be anything important, since pay-walling has effectively removed them from history of about two generations of IT experts. My generation (started career in mid-90s) included.
Re: (Score:2)
> pay-walling has effectively removed them from history of about two generations of IT experts
Not really the audience - more academic than that.
I used to subscribe to a few journals but ACM was for poseurs.
e.g. SunExpert or Doctor Dobbs' were more relevant.
Those went away when dialup Internet became widely available.
I read some ACM proceedings for grad classes and they were good but dry and research oriented.
Now ACM has caught up with 1999. Good, I suppose.
Lifelong email address (Score:4, Interesting)
\Honestly, I still have no idea what ACM is.
It's more of an academic oriented computing organization. The mailed forwarding email is useful, a "lifelong" email address stretching back to college when you joined as a student, Also classier for resumes.
Re: (Score:2)
Savages!.
Time still matters, Hypocrite. (Score:1)
ACM plans to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when its five-year transition to full Open Access is complete (January 2026 target date)..
If you want reaction out of The Public, then create reasonable expectations, Hypocrite. NO ONE gives a flying fuck about January 2026 right now. And I mean NO ONE.
Re:Time still matters, Hypocrite. (Score:5, Informative)
You need to read in a little more detail. They started this process in 2020 with a five-year timeline. As of today (when they've launched their "new website"), all of their articles are freely available - and you can grab PDFs of their journals. You don't even need to create an account. From TFA:
"As part of this transition and to coincide with the launch of CACM‘s new website, all CACM articles, past, present, and future, will be published in front of the subscription paywall."
Now I will admit to being puzzled about what still remains to be done on their part, given all their articles are available. I don't care enough to investigate... but I'm sure the answer is on their site somewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
You need to read in a little more detail. They started this process in 2020 with a five-year timeline.
I love how we’re pretending a paywall in the IT realm somehow translates to a 5-year timeline, as if they’re literally having to wait for permit approvals and red tape to lay down a few hundred miles of digital asphalt in order to move those bits and bytes around.
Now I will admit to being puzzled about what still remains to be done on their part, given all their articles are available. I don't care enough to investigate... but I'm sure the answer is on their site somewhere.
You being puzzled onfirms why I really don’t have to read the “detail”. They either want to put all the content on the other side of a for-profit paywall, or they want to make excuses as to why they can’t do it
Re: Time still matters, Hypocrite. (Score:1)
ACM is a non-profit with a responsibility to the members paying its fees. They have been extremely transparent about their move to open access (more than any other association I
Re: Time still matters, Hypocrite. (Score:1)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635166
It takes two years to open an archive? (Score:1)
It takes two years to open the archive?
What is involved other than just disabling the paywall? It sounds like something that could be done before lunch tomorrow.
What am I not understanding?
Re: (Score:3)
My assumption; just guessing here is it's probably/Presumably the vast majority of their Digital library, such as individual articles stays closed access, and it's likely CACM Issues being freed.
That might require extra work on their part to identify what pages gets to be opened and what files stay closed
Re: (Score:3)
No, that doesn't appear to be the case. It appears they're moving to a model where peer-reviewed, published content is freely available. The revenue is apparently going to come from those universities whose faculty publish articles in the various ACM publications. Details are here:
https://libraries.acm.org/subs... [acm.org]
I'm not sure how it's going to work in the real world, but I wish them luck (no sarcasm intended).
A step in the right direction for ACM (Score:3)
I've argued for the last 10-15 years that ACM and IEEE should lead the way and go to open access models for their publications. They need to ween themselves from the addiction of publications as a revenue source. (Disclosure: I was an ACM SIG Officer for several years in the '80s and '90s, so I have an understanding of at least one SIG's finances.) Certainly there are costs that need to be accounted for, but I thought those could be managed through membership fees, sponsorship, possibly 'publication charges' for authors and their institutions, and efforts at cost avoidance through the publication program.
So who's paying for it now? (Score:2)
I didn't see anything about submission fees in the announcement. So how's this getting paid for? Have they just shifted the costs onto the authors, in a pay-to-play manner?
Doing so disproportionately affects researchers at small institutions without the budgets to pay multi-thousand-dollar author fees.
Re: (Score:2)
CACM has usually been paid for out of membership fees to ACM (which I've been paying for years, because I actually find CACM and Queue interesting and thus worth funding). Presumably it will continue to be paid for the same way. There is a chance that enough folks will cancel their membership and read it for free that it will be costly for ACM. There's also a chance that enough folks will notice ACM and decide it is useful that they gain members. I wish them well and hope for the later, but in today's world
Re: (Score:2)
The ACM is a quite large organization, with tens of thousands of paying members (like myself, for >25 years). They also take part in organizing conferences. Have you heard about the Turing award, often equated to "the Nobel prize of computing"? It's the ACM that awards it.
There are many other sources of income for the ACM. they have surely run the numbers and realized that, while not negligible, the income they got from individual access to magazine articles was not relevant enough.
I guess this will not
Late indexing (Score:2)
> the site's editor-in-chief told Slashdot. "We need to get Google to reindex the new site ASAP."
There was a time when Google would have been paying attention to the ACM's longstanding plans, and would have had the reindexing available almost immediately.
Google and ChatGPT both (Score:2)