4 ms·
I can see where you are coming from..but between my ACM and IEEE CS student memberships costing only like $50/year combined (give or take a few for the variety
by silencio 18y ago
I can see where you are coming from..but between my ACM and IEEE CS student memberships costing only like $50/year combined (give or take a few for the variety of add-ons) and giving me access to MSDNAA (lots and lots of MS software my school doesn't even come close to providing), Safari Books Online, Books24x7 and other resources, I can still see a reason why I still pay for both.
The original writer does have a point about what's showing up in publications like CACM, but there are alternatives for publication (i.e. arXiv) and an organization would have to provide more than just that to be a significant alternative to either one.
- wheels 18y agoI too kept a membership as long as was a student. The fact that the ACM sent dozens of spam messages after I was no longer a student and didn't want to pay the $200 fee also burned me on them. I'd still pay $50 a year. I'd even pay $20 a month for the months where I'm doing research intensive stuff. I'd pay $2 for a paper probably. But given the fact that I can find nearly every paper that I need elsewhere it's often hard to justify $200 a year for an organization that I'm not terribly fond of. Other major annoyance -- even if you get a paper accepted at an ACM conference, you have to pay the several hundred dollar registration fees. I think if there were an alternative organization with backing from a handful of notable computer scientists, that made membership more ubiquitous, built a community around computing research and streamlined things like the peer review process, it could be pretty powerful.