5 ms·

Maybe I am old school and blunt but IMHO: >As a student (and now an engineer in industry) in the CS and applied math fields, I can't count how many times durin

Maybe I am old school and blunt but IMHO: >As a student (and now an engineer in industry) in the CS and applied math fields, I can't count how many times during research where I see a useful article behind an IEEE/ACM paywall. I have never heard of a college that doesn't pay for this access for their students... >Are you aware of any efforts/campaigns to demand more open access from these two behemoths, who pretend to be on our side? If you are a computer science related professional you should be an ACM or IEEE member and thus have access to their digital libraries. If you want to have access to guild resources, join the guild.

jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago
> I have never heard of a college that doesn't pay for this access for their students... The vast majority of educational institutions are not in the US and do not have anywhere near the funding to pay rent to the ACM/IEEE. Every dollar they spend on something like pay-wall access would be better spent investing in their students. > If you want to have access to guild resources, join the guild. Guilds are cartels. That's why we don't have them anymore except in the more neutered form of trade unions. But also, the content ACM et all charge for is not their original contribution. Other people write the papers and give them to the ACM for free. Other people review the papers for the ACM for free. The ACM takes in about 60mm each year but only spends 40mm on it's various activities. At one time something like the ACM was necessary purely for pragmatic reasons. But now we have the Web, and there is no reason someone should be earning a 20mm profit for artificially restricting the flow of knowledge in the discipline. By comparison the total budget of arXive is around 400k. The ACM could make the digital library free not make a dent in funding for any of the actually useful stuff they do. It's also unconscionable that the ACM attempts to police 3rd parties linking to copies of papers published on author's homepages. This issue specifically is why I canceled my membership (after writing a letter of complaint that received the most self-aggrandizing response you can imagine) I'm more charitable to the IEEE as they do a lot of standards work, which does benefit from having a centralized bureaucratic organization.
ANTSANTS 13y ago
Please consider: • The self-taught of all ages who may have never set foot in a university, or have begun informally studying an unrelated discipline on their own after leaving formal education. That they exist and can make use of academic research may sound far-fetched for people in some disciplines, but it's not at all unheard of, at the very least, for CS, statistics, and mathematics. • Precocious youth • As jasonwatkinspdx mentioned, students that do not live in the US • That restricting access to these materials takes a hidden toll on humanity; unless they are made freely available to all, we will never know how others might have taken advantage of them.
jacques_chester 13y ago
I am a member of both the IEEE and ACM. First, you have to be a member of both, as the literature is divided between them. Second, library access isn't included in the membership. It's an extra. Third, the IEEE in particular partition the hell out of their database and you often wind up paying anyhow ("oh sorry, that's not in the IEEE-CS library, now f-you-pay-me").

jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago

> I have never heard of a college that doesn't pay for this access for their students... The vast majority of educational institutions are not in the US and do not have anywhere near the funding to pay rent to the ACM/IEEE. Every dollar they spend on something like pay-wall access would be better spent investing in their students. > If you want to have access to guild resources, join the guild. Guilds are cartels. That's why we don't have them anymore except in the more neutered form of trade unions. But also, the content ACM et all charge for is not their original contribution. Other people write the papers and give them to the ACM for free. Other people review the papers for the ACM for free. The ACM takes in about 60mm each year but only spends 40mm on it's various activities. At one time something like the ACM was necessary purely for pragmatic reasons. But now we have the Web, and there is no reason someone should be earning a 20mm profit for artificially restricting the flow of knowledge in the discipline. By comparison the total budget of arXive is around 400k. The ACM could make the digital library free not make a dent in funding for any of the actually useful stuff they do. It's also unconscionable that the ACM attempts to police 3rd parties linking to copies of papers published on author's homepages. This issue specifically is why I canceled my membership (after writing a letter of complaint that received the most self-aggrandizing response you can imagine) I'm more charitable to the IEEE as they do a lot of standards work, which does benefit from having a centralized bureaucratic organization.

ANTSANTS 13y ago

Please consider: • The self-taught of all ages who may have never set foot in a university, or have begun informally studying an unrelated discipline on their own after leaving formal education. That they exist and can make use of academic research may sound far-fetched for people in some disciplines, but it's not at all unheard of, at the very least, for CS, statistics, and mathematics. • Precocious youth • As jasonwatkinspdx mentioned, students that do not live in the US • That restricting access to these materials takes a hidden toll on humanity; unless they are made freely available to all, we will never know how others might have taken advantage of them.

jacques_chester 13y ago

I am a member of both the IEEE and ACM. First, you have to be a member of both, as the literature is divided between them. Second, library access isn't included in the membership. It's an extra. Third, the IEEE in particular partition the hell out of their database and you often wind up paying anyhow ("oh sorry, that's not in the IEEE-CS library, now f-you-pay-me").