4 ms·

As asgard1024 mentioned, yes you can make the paper available on your own personal site. However personal websites have a lifespan - people move institutions, c

As asgard1024 mentioned, yes you can make the paper available on your own personal site. However personal websites have a lifespan - people move institutions, change jobs (e.g. in my case into industry), and eventually die. Thus the need for a repository of publications maintained by a third party. ACM's digital library serves this role - and well (for those with access to it) - but the fact that copyright is already surrendered by the author prevents any other third-parties from building similar repositories. Given that doing so is relatively cheap and easy with the technology available today, I see substantial value in making it legally possible for this to be done; an example where this has been done is arxiv.org. These sites are basically the Internet equivalent of libraries, and are analogous to mirrors or repositories of open source software. Having this ability means we won't lose the material just because the author is no longer willing or able to maintain their personal website.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Citeseer caches papers, I'm not sure how legal that is. I find my papers get copied a bit around the web, and there is always Google's books' project. I don't see much point to arxiv, and I also am not sure how to put my papers there given that it wants me to use latex in some certain way. The real DL disruptor is Google Scholar, which provides much more value in just making things "findable" as well as dealing reasonably well with citations and finding a free copy somewhere. Citeseer used to fill that roll, but hasn't been updated in a long time. How fast a paper goes into obscurity is a litmus test in determining its value (and if its worth downloading and reading). So if the author stops caring after 5 years, then why should we care also? Much of what gets published just isn't very good. On the other hand, a good paper (that people find valuable) will get copied around to various locations, and will be findable that way. But there is always stuff that falls through the cracks of this test...like old overlooked work that was actually decent, but I have the feeling that we've expanded so much as a discipline, that finding such work will be virtually impossible for anything published after 1997 or so, DL or no DL.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

Citeseer caches papers, I'm not sure how legal that is. I find my papers get copied a bit around the web, and there is always Google's books' project. I don't see much point to arxiv, and I also am not sure how to put my papers there given that it wants me to use latex in some certain way. The real DL disruptor is Google Scholar, which provides much more value in just making things "findable" as well as dealing reasonably well with citations and finding a free copy somewhere. Citeseer used to fill that roll, but hasn't been updated in a long time. How fast a paper goes into obscurity is a litmus test in determining its value (and if its worth downloading and reading). So if the author stops caring after 5 years, then why should we care also? Much of what gets published just isn't very good. On the other hand, a good paper (that people find valuable) will get copied around to various locations, and will be findable that way. But there is always stuff that falls through the cracks of this test...like old overlooked work that was actually decent, but I have the feeling that we've expanded so much as a discipline, that finding such work will be virtually impossible for anything published after 1997 or so, DL or no DL.