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ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

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Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#51

Post by bpt3 »

kragen wrote: post #33
bpt3 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth... And to claim that new articles aren't important or that the ACM will never publish a highly impactful paper again is absurd. Enjoy your free access to a wealth of human knowledge you played no part in creating, rather than waving a meaningless declaration around demanding more for nothing and demeaning individual authors.

Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have. I'm n…

> Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have.

You (and I) are free to publish in venues that meet our requirements.

> I'm not demanding that the ACM do more. I'm demanding that they do less, by renouncing their right to sue other people for legally archive and redistribute ACM papers, so the ACM don't bear the full responsibility of doing so themselves. That way, I can do more of that wealth-of-knowledge-creating stuff you're so excited about, benefiting the ACM's members. It's a win-win.

I am not at all worried about this, and there's no real reason for you to be either (the odds of the ACM library vanishing is almost 0), so it seems like you're being needlessly hostile.

> It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing. That affects how we write literally every line of code in every language today except maybe assembly. Maybe one of the LLM papers might compete?

I'm sorry, but this is absurd. "Attention is all you need" comes to mind as a recent example of a highly impactful paper (not published in an ACM venue, but you're now expanding your claim to the entire field of CS).

> On a different note, it seems like you mostly post comments on HN in order to personally attack other commenters, as you are doing here, and to advocate political positions. That isn't what the site is for. If you keep doing it, they're going to ban you.

You're a real peach.

Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#52

Post by clueless »

bubblethink wrote: post #9
rs186 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always worked like that.

This is just shifting the cost from the readers to the writers. It doesn't make it any better as the prices are completely out of touch with reality. Note that this is not the cost for registering at a conference; that is separate. This is just the publishing fee for each paper.

in an open access world, who should be paying the people who are reviewing the papers (which cost time/money)?

Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#53

Post by bubblethink »

clueless wrote: post #52
bubblethink wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just shifting the cost from the readers to the writers. It doesn't make it any better as the prices are completely out of touch with reality. Note that this is not the cost for registering at a conference; that is separate. This is just the publishing fee for each paper.

in an open access world, who should be paying the people who are reviewing the papers (which cost time/money)?

Reviewers aren't paid. This is just money for ACM, the non profit.

Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#54

Post by bpt3 »

kragen wrote: post #44
lsuresh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#57

Post by clueless »

bubblethink wrote: post #53
clueless wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in an open access world, who should be paying the people who are reviewing the papers (which cost time/money)?

Reviewers aren't paid. This is just money for ACM, the non profit.

ah in that case, this is long over due.

Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#58

Post by kragen »

bpt3 wrote: post #54
kragen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#59

Post by kragen »

westurner wrote: post #49
kragen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new articles aren't important. The ACM is probably never again going to publish a paper as influential as Liskov's paper I mentioned above, or Knuth's "Structured Programming With go to Statements", or "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362929.362947 , or Schorre's "META-II: A Syntax-Oriented Compiler Writing Language" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800257.808896 , or Ken…

> probably never again going to publish Does this mean that ScholarlyArticles that authors choose to publish with ACM can be uploaded to e.g. ArXiv in full instead of only the preprints? (If you upload PostScript and PDF to ArXiv, they can generate an HTML5 rendering of the article.) Open access > Effects on scholarly publishing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access I learned OO from lots of great resources, and…

Anyone can upload a CC-BY article in full to anywhere, and anyone can upload a CC-BY-NC-ND article to anywhere noncommercial. ArXiv only accepts uploads from authors, though.

The "history" section of the Wikipedia article cites Kay's excellent "Early History of Smalltalk" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/155360.155364 which of course does cite Ingalls's 01978 POPL paper, as well as 17 other papers published by the ACM, by my count, more than any other single publisher except Xerox. That section also highlights the ACM conference OOPSLA and cites Borning's "Thinglab", published at OOPSLA. So access to historical ACM papers is extremely important for understanding the history of object-orientation.

Re: ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

#60

Post by kragen »

bpt3 wrote: post #51
kragen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have. I'm n…

> Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have. You…

The odds of the ACM library vanishing are the same as the odds that you, personally, are going to die: at least 1000:1 in favor.† The only question is whether it happens before the relevant copyrights expire. Anyone who can't convince CloudFlare they're human has already lost access to the ACM library.

I've already addressed your "You are free to publish" argument.

I'm being hostile because your comment, in addition to being factually incorrect in a way that demonstrates your complete unfamiliarity with the subject matter, consisted almost entirely of personal attacks on me. You accused me of "looking a gift horse in the mouth", of playing "no part" in "creating" "human knowledge", and "demanding more for nothing". Now you're implying you thought that was friendly rhetoric? Do you expect anyone to believe that? How stupid do you think other people are?

I already gave "Attention is all you need" as a recent example of a possibly highly impactful paper in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734480. The fact that it wasn't published in an ACM venue is one of the reasons that the ACM's policy on new papers is relatively inconsequential compared to their policy on existing papers.

______

† I'd say 1:0 in favor, but rationally speaking, we can't completely exclude the possibility that all of this is some sort of hallucination or simulation, or that time will stop tomorrow so that everything that exists at that time will never vanish, and so on. But, under the usual presumptions that the universe is objectively real and everything in it vanishes sooner or later, the ACM Digital Library is absolutely guaranteed to vanish. And if you think it's inconceivable that it will be destroyed by political machinations within a few years, did you predict two years ago that the US would vote in favor of Russia invading Ukraine in the UN?

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