What does this mean? The 800,000 previously published articles will stay paywalled and only the new stuff will be open? Or will stuff be open to individuals while institutions have to keep paying? Or what?
What's the license?
The Berlin Declaration that defined Open Access https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration defines it as follows:
> 1. Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
> 2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability [sic], and long-term archiving.
This page is all about #2. What's #1?
I'm delighted to be able to read and share the classic CACM articles that have shaped the history of informatics, thanks to the ACM's policy changes over the last few years. The other day, for example, I was reading Liskov's paper on CLU in which she introduces the abstract data type: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800233.807045
But, as far as I can tell, neither that web page nor the PDF linked from it has a license granting "a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose." So, if I post it on my personal web site, or upload it to WikiSource or the Internet Archive, I'm still at risk of copyright lawsuits. And until I can do that, I only have access to the paper as long as CloudFlare thinks I'm human.
That's the problem Open Access is designed to solve.
The ACM is probably never again going to publish a paper as influential as Liskov's paper I mentioned above, or Knuth's "Structured Programming With go to Statements", or "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362929.362947, or Schorre's "META-II: A Syntax-Oriented Compiler Writing Language" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800257.808896, or Ken Thompson's "Regular Expression Search Algorithm" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363347.363387, or Dan Ingalls on "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762.
Papers like those are the ones that we need to protect our ability to archive and distribute. Not David Geerts's "The Transformative Power of Inspiration" from the current issue of CACM https://cacm.acm.org/careers/the-transformative-power-of-ins.... (I am not making this up.) Thompson was competing with, let's say, Mooers and Schorre; Geerts has decided instead to compete with Jesus, the Buddha, and Norman Vincent Peale, and my brief reading of the article does not offer much hope for his prospects.
It seems safe to say that in 30 or 100 years' time nobody will cite Geerts's article as a turning point in the human understanding of inspiration, so if it's lost due to copyright restrictions, it probably won't matter that much.
At the other extreme, scholars seeking to understand the historical origins of object-orientation or personal computers would be crippled without access to material like Ingalls's paper. I'm not speculating—I'm speaking from experience, because lacking that access, I grew up thinking C++ was object-oriented!
But what do we see on the current version of the Ingalls paper that the ACM's web server just gave me? A note added in 02002 prohibiting public archival and redistribution:
> Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work or personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
And to claim that new articles aren't important or that the ACM will never publish a highly impactful paper again is absurd.
Enjoy your free access to a wealth of human knowledge you played no part in creating, rather than waving a meaningless declaration around demanding more for nothing and demeaning individual authors.
I'm not demanding that the ACM do more. I'm demanding that they do less, by renouncing their right to sue other people for legally archive and redistribute ACM papers, so the ACM don't bear the full responsibility of doing so themselves. That way, I can do more of that wealth-of-knowledge-creating stuff you're so excited about, benefiting the ACM's members. It's a win-win.
It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing. That affects how we write literally every line of code in every language today except maybe assembly. Maybe one of the LLM papers might compete?
On a different note, it seems like you mostly post comments on HN in order to personally attack other commenters, as you are doing here, and to advocate political positions. That isn't what the site is for. If you keep doing it, they're going to ban you.
"GOTO Is All You Need"
The former sounds like a LessWrong fanfic.
Ok, disclaimer that I am not a computer scientist (work in semiconductors so only tangentially related). But, this statement has the same "end of history" energy has the famous Philipp von Jolly quote about end of theoretical physics:
"In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."
I'm not claiming you are saying its end of CS, just the claim that there cannot be a new paradigm discovered in CS doesn't sit right with me.
But I don't think it's especially controversial to claim that Galileo and Newton had more of an impact on physics than Maxwell and Einstein or than anyone since. You could maybe quibble about Gauss and Lagrange, but Kip Thorne and Ed Witten are much more similar to Galileo than Galileo was to Descartes or Aristotle.
You might be able to cause an Einstein-like revolution in informatics—LLMs in particular seem like they have a good chance of doing that. But the field those new paradigms revolutionize will probably be recognizably the field that was largely defined by papers published in CACM in the 60s and 70s.
Also, although this isn't relevant to my thesis that probably nobody will publish such an impactful paper again, the ACM is especially unlikely to. "Attention is All You Need" https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3... got published in NIPS 2017 rather than CACM or even an ACM conference. You could imagine a timeline where CACM was the Cell or Lancet of informatics and published papers like AiAYN instead of "The Transformative Power of Inspiration". But that's not the one we're in.
You (and I) are free to publish in venues that meet our requirements.
> I'm not demanding that the ACM do more. I'm demanding that they do less, by renouncing their right to sue other people for legally archive and redistribute ACM papers, so the ACM don't bear the full responsibility of doing so themselves. That way, I can do more of that wealth-of-knowledge-creating stuff you're so excited about, benefiting the ACM's members. It's a win-win.
I am not at all worried about this, and there's no real reason for you to be either (the odds of the ACM library vanishing is almost 0), so it seems like you're being needlessly hostile.
> It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing. That affects how we write literally every line of code in every language today except maybe assembly. Maybe one of the LLM papers might compete?
I'm sorry, but this is absurd. "Attention is all you need" comes to mind as a recent example of a highly impactful paper (not published in an ACM venue, but you're now expanding your claim to the entire field of CS).
> On a different note, it seems like you mostly post comments on HN in order to personally attack other commenters, as you are doing here, and to advocate political positions. That isn't what the site is for. If you keep doing it, they're going to ban you.
You're a real peach.
I've already addressed your "You are free to publish" argument.
I'm being hostile because your comment, in addition to being factually incorrect in a way that demonstrates your complete unfamiliarity with the subject matter, consisted almost entirely of personal attacks on me. You accused me of "looking a gift horse in the mouth", of playing "no part" in "creating" "human knowledge", and "demanding more for nothing". Now you're implying you thought that was friendly rhetoric? Do you expect anyone to believe that? How stupid do you think other people are?
I already gave "Attention is all you need" as a recent example of a possibly highly impactful paper in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734480. The fact that it wasn't published in an ACM venue is one of the reasons that the ACM's policy on new papers is relatively inconsequential compared to their policy on existing papers.
______
† I'd say 1:0 in favor, but rationally speaking, we can't completely exclude the possibility that all of this is some sort of hallucination or simulation, or that time will stop tomorrow so that everything that exists at that time will never vanish, and so on. But, under the usual presumptions that the universe is objectively real and everything in it vanishes sooner or later, the ACM Digital Library is absolutely guaranteed to vanish. And if you think it's inconceivable that it will be destroyed by political machinations within a few years, did you predict two years ago that the US would vote in favor of Russia invading Ukraine in the UN?
Does this mean that ScholarlyArticles that authors choose to publish with ACM can be uploaded to e.g. ArXiv in full instead of only the preprints?
(If you upload PostScript and PDF to ArXiv, they can generate an HTML5 rendering of the article.)
Open access > Effects on scholarly publishing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
I learned OO from lots of great resources, and may have been disadvantaged to have have never read Ingall's paper; which isn't yet cited in Wikipedia's OO page under History.
Object orientated programinng > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming#Hi...
"'Considered harmful' considered harmful"
Considered harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
Edsger Dijkstra published "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" (1998) with CACM.
The "history" section of the Wikipedia article cites Kay's excellent "Early History of Smalltalk" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/155360.155364 which of course does cite Ingalls's 01978 POPL paper, as well as 17 other papers published by the ACM, by my count, more than any other single publisher except Xerox. That section also highlights the ACM conference OOPSLA and cites Borning's "Thinglab", published at OOPSLA. So access to historical ACM papers is extremely important for understanding the history of object-orientation.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
You'll note, for example, that https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... bears no license of any kind, and the unfortunate fact is that under current copyright law is that random people redistributing copies of the paper is by default illegal.
Open access means just that to most people, not free reign to do whatever you like with the content as the hosting piece isn't all that relevant.
Most people don't have any idea what we're talking about; if you asked most people what Kosaraju's algorithm was, how an absorption refrigerator worked, or who the Four Hundred were in the Gilded Age, they also wouldn't have anything sensible to say. In https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9 they found that less than half of college students in the USA knew the name of the capital of Iraq, which was currently full of US troops. And in https://youtu.be/ZjGd1F1Xk8w?t=18 you can see lots of random people who don't know what "WWW" stands for and think Asia is a country.
Talking about "open access" without knowing about the Berlin Declaration at the heart of that movement is the same kind of ignorance.
Or rather a ";login:".
Does anyone want to form an ACM Cool Papers Club?
PaulHoule•6mo ago
musicale•6mo ago
Though I'm not a fan of charging exorbitant open access fees. Arxiv charges exactly how much?
Still waiting for IEEE though.