7 ms·
Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library
- recursivedoubts 3mo agothe digital library should have always been open access now it will be fodder for the slop machine (i think that LLMs are going to wreck the peer review system for all but hard-experimental papers)
- jmount 3mo agoCame to say the same thing. Now remains the time to give the public access to the ACM digital library.
- cobbal 3mo agoACM agrees I think: https://dl.acm.org/openaccess https://dl.acm.org/openaccess > Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.
- harles 3mo agoWait, so did this already happen and it just didn’t get attention?
- philipkglass 3mo agoIt was a front page story here on HN back in December 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991
- Jtsummers 3mo agoIt got a lot of discussion here when it happened and before as they phased it in.
- ilaksh 3mo agoThe real efficacy of the peer review system has always been somewhat questionable. That's a big reason why arxiv is so prominent.
- dan_gee 3mo ago> I think that LLMs are going to wreck the peer review system for all but hard-experimental papers I think I may be shadowbanned, but at what point do we start viewing LLMs as a national security threat?
- jerf 3mo agoSince starting to use AIs seriously for search in the last 3 months I have read and referenced more published papers and academic primary sources then I think I did in the previous 5 years. They're fantastic for pointing at some claim and asking for the primary source for it, and then it does the work of following things through the layers of backref to the original, assuming it's online. Opening the library up to AI access makes it far more accessible and usable then it was before. AIs, at least in their current form, make you more who ever you were. If you want snap, glib answers of dubious accuracy, they'll give them to you, more easily than ever before. If you want to dig back into primary sources and get the original content, they'll do that for you, more easily than ever before. Can't speak to how the science infrastructure is going to handle them, but if it takes down the peer review system, which I think has been worthless for probably going on two decades and has just given the entire enterprise a false sense of assurance, it'll probably be a net gain in the end. Peer review is a source of more problems then it is solving right now.
- juancn 3mo agoThey probably already scraped it.
- pohl 3mo agoNo doubt
- IAmGraydon 3mo agoOf course they did. There is open access to this library. These guys actually think they're offering new training data? It's kind of hilariously naive.
- computerdork 3mo agoHaha, agreed:)
- amelius 3mo agoThrough scihub, probably.
- ilaksh 3mo agoI don't want to be mean but if it's that hard to even recognize that LLMs are even a valid thing that could intersect with your business that you need some kind of campaign for it.. It's almost like, "don't hurt yourself unc, we will just search arxiv".
- skippyfish 3mo agoACM has been leaning heavily into AI-generated content for their journals in the past year, and this article is no exception: it appears to be 100% AI generated and full of LLM verbiage. There's something hilarious about that, but also, snake eating its own tail.
- Diogenesian 3mo agoI don't think this is AI-generated. It is focused and direct. It reads like anodyne albeit totally human academic manager writing.
- skywhopper 3mo agoTLDR: “we’re going to try to get money from LLM providers for access to our back catalog without getting permission from the authors or providing them with any share of the revenue”.
- anticensor 3mo agoScholarly article authors never expected royalty or permission for their scholarly works to be reused.
- hbnfg 3mo ago[flagged]
- fsmv 3mo agoHow about we give humans access
- m-hodges 3mo agoDo humans not have access? https://dl.acm.org/openaccess https://dl.acm.org/openaccess
- hmokiguess 3mo agoSo will LLMs have premium-tier access or basic-tier access?
- 0xCE0 3mo agoIt seems that the "open access" is more marketing than something reality based they actually want to do. https://dl.acm.org/openaccess https://dl.acm.org/openaccess ---> So how to access the content? Do I have to register or what? It the "open access" only for academic org's people or for everyone in the world? https://dl.acm.org/ https://dl.acm.org/ ---> Okay, nice simple search field without loggin in, but when you try to search something, you get thousands of results, even if you search specific author and the exact name of paper, you will get hundreds of results and the thing you want is buried somewhere on page 247. Filters of authors, years etc. are for Premium subscription. But just googling the thing finds the link to ACM... And want to get the actual PDF? Hope it says "free access"...
- riedel 3mo agoNobody uses their search anyways. Google scholar has become the way to search papers (which is somewhat worrisome). What people want from there is a download for all the stuff that does not list an author copy. Open access IMHO is just a reaction to the fact that mostly you would not need a subscription anyhow. Now the authors are paying upfront or universities are paying flat for all their researchers. The problem is now the incentives are not increasing the number of subscriptions but increasing the number of papers published.
- dominotw 3mo ago
- 30129875 3mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway27448 3mo agoAs if anthropic, openai et al would ask for permission lmao
- croes 3mo agoAre they in the position to do that? What about the authors?
- dsr_ 3mo agoThe ACM sent around a nice query to members which made it clear that they were going to do it even if 100% of the members said "No, don't do that". I suppose they could be sued.
- em3rgent0rdr 3mo agoDon't you grant ACM a right to distribute your work when publishing? So doesn't ACM already have the right to grant access to AI?
- spoaceman7777 3mo agoBlocking access only hurts people who follow the rules. Unblocking access lets them compete with those who break the rules. I think the right choice is pretty clear...
- hmokiguess 3mo agoNow? That's cute.
- bezko 3mo agoSomething something Roko's basilisk
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoIt's already in there
- Cynddl 3mo agoAs a researcher with many articles in the ACM library, I have to say this is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Obviously, lawyers can decipher the terms of ACM publishing contracts and Creative Commons licences to determine if this will be acceptable or not. But ACM is not a company, it's a non-profit founded in 1947 to represent scientists. I would be surprised if a majority of ACM members were to say yes should we ask them (but ACM is not known for such democracy). Along with book authors, we are one of the many people that provide the knowledge and expertise on which large tech firms train their models, and get nothing in return. Actually, life is getting worse for us: extra workload in universities with students' AI use, a completely broken peer review system, etc. Hence the irony of ACM thinking about licensing, and only licensing, at a time where this is the least of our priorities.
- maCDzP 3mo agoIf it was a non profit that trained the model - would that change your mind?
- Cynddl 3mo agoThe issue here is ACM focusing on licensing. A non profit would not be able to pay ACM for access. Hence why this policy is hypocritical: it gives more power to the larger players and undermines smaller actors in the field who have fewer resources.
- bonoboTP 3mo agoWhy did you sign off your copyright to ACM then? If you kept the copyright and prevented others from distributing your work, you could be the sole distributor and negotiate the price with the AI company yourself.
- kelnos 3mo agoBecause if you don't publish in academia, you might as well be dead. And the terms for most places to publish are similar. It's a racket.
- iFire 3mo agoWould you prefer a parquet dump of acm articles to hugging face? A llm emulating a person is why many of my used sites banned llms due to scraping bandwith costs Is this about access or accessibility to claude (for example) I am sure the entirely of human computing knowledge is not that big.
- bitwize 3mo agoWell if LLMs get access to it, we humans should get free access to it as well!
- estebarb 3mo agoI'm really not sure how this would work. I don't know how the ACM works, but in IEEE you would have to give them your publishing rights. However, training a LLM is not publishing by itself, it is a derivative work? Any way, at this point authors should be entitled to monetary compensation, not the publisher. The deal is totally different.
- agar 3mo agoThis reminds me of the "I drink your milkshake" scene from "There Will Be Blood." Does the ACM really think LLMs haven't already consumed 90% of the content through other sources?
- nekusar 3mo agoWhat about us average humans, or is it ONLY the corporate LLM token dealers who get access? Either way, I'll pirate.
- rurban 3mo agoSo give it for free to the open weight models, and charge the closed weight models. Easy
- etdznots 3mo agoMost ACM text is already part of the pre training corpus for all frontier LLMs
- davexunit 3mo agoNo it's not.
- boredatoms 3mo agoPresumably the LLMs already have all this from other sources of pdfs?
- jruohonen 3mo agoSo much misinformation in this thread.
- jval43 3mo agoIt was so close! I could already see the end of all the predatory publishing and flourishing of open-access. Some even required by law. Knowledge was finally going to be free. But no, it will presumably get much worse as LLMs are inserted into this equation as yet another and new gatekeeper. (Disclaimer: I have publications with ACM, non open-access. And ACM wasn't even too bad, it's the others that give me pause.)
- deepnlp-contact 3mo agoI asked a mathematician the same question about whether we should allow AI systems to access all research papers and ideas, potentially putting their future careers at risk. He was very pessimistic about how human knowledge will compete with AI-generated proofs flooding the market. Especially in mathematics, many specialized areas have fewer than 100 people worldwide who are capable of determining whether a result is correct or not. The mathematics community will certainly be willing to use AI to assist with their research, but they may strongly object to a flood of AI-generated mathematics papers produced by others.
- woshihouzi2026 3mo ago[dead]
- krater23 3mo agoThey really think that their data is not already part of the models. Silly...
- Rochus 3mo agoScientific publications (including ACM) should be openly accessible to anyone. I find it very annoying that there is a paywall everywhere. And for the (few) people here seeing AI as something useful, it's definitely better if it is trained on scientific publications than on e.g. Reddit discussions.
- jreynar 3mo agoI think ACM should give everything away for free. US taxpayers pay for a lot of research and the previous administration required that government funded research be published and made freely available. See https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022... The back catalog at ACM isn't subject to this requirement and nor is research that's not funded by the US government, but I completely agree with the spirt of this law: research should be shared knowledge that other intelligences can build upon, whether human or machine. If you want to limit access to what you've done, don't publish it. Get a patent if that's an option, or keep it internal to a company as a trade secret.
- stevenalowe 3mo agoyes please - better yet, train your own ACM model on it