> 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

> 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.