_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access
jll29 wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
After ACL, now ACM set its papers free; let'S hope IEEE will be next.
pfdietz wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
Many already were.
notarobot123 wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
Does this kind of general shift more firmly establish a marketplace and
business model for eminent "peers" to more easily create independent
journals? Universities increasingly price in this pay to publish model
so groups of editors could very easily corner their respective niches
with independent publications if they cooperate with one another. The
market is ripe for fragmentation.
Maybe this is wishful thinking but a proliferation of openly accessible
and competing independent publications could correct for a lot of the
ills of the Goodhart effect in academic publishing. Market shifts that
make this evolutionary pathway feasible and realistic are exiting.
pwlm wrote 13 hours 36 min ago:
I want the other half of HackerNews which isn't exactly ACM
publications: a fast way to publish peer-reviewed work without
gatekeeping by prestige or fees.
psychoslave wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
Will it be retro-active? I stopped my ACM subscription after they broke
their deal with access to OâReilly platform. And if I want to access
ACM in general I can use my wikpedia library credential I guess, but
possibly there was things still unavailable through that partnership.
WalterBright wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
Perhaps a system where the University publishes papers written by its
researchers, and nobody else. That way, there is gatekeeping in the
form of the University not hiring researchers who are kooks or frauds.
The University's incentive would be maintaining their reputation.
nektro wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
wow this is wonderful news!
quantum_state wrote 21 hours 5 min ago:
This is good news for modern man.
krick wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
Very good and appreciated, but I think for math/CS the problem is
essentially solved by virtue of having arxiv.org strongly embedded into
the culture, so I consider it just a PR stunt. Thanks nevertheless.
rvnx wrote 23 hours 43 min ago:
Finally! Free material to ingest in our LLMs (while it violates
copyright, it's good for the humanity as the reasoning of LLMs can lead
to new discoveries and more widespread knowledge).
NamlchakKhandro wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
i dont even understand why these things exist...
just publish your stuff in a website... on a blog, on github....
algernonramone wrote 1 day ago:
It's not immediately clear from reading this what this means for ACM
books, both older ones and new ones. I'm a fan of a lot of their older
books, such as the Turing Award Lecture anthology they published in the
early 1990s. I'm also interested in some of the newer books they've
published in the last several years (The tributes to Dijkstra and Hoare
especially stand out). I really hope these are included as well.
andreyf wrote 1 day ago:
Great news, and hopefully more to come across other publications! If
only aaronsw was here to see it :(
sega_sai wrote 1 day ago:
The natural change from this are the journals with no cost of
publication. There is no way that the added value of the journal is
thousands of dollars, especially given that the referees work for free.
In astrophysics we already have a journal like that is gaining traction
after several publishers switched to golden open access.
The system when the taxpayer subsidizes enormous profit margins of
Elsevier etc while relying on free work by referees is crazy
nodesocket wrote 1 day ago:
How is this Discords fault at all? I thought almost all bug bounties
donât apply to 3rd party services.
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Is this going to include all of their back catalog? Iâve had a lot of
free time lately and decided Iâve been missing the SIGPLAN
proceedings and have b been procrastinating on reactivating my old
membership to get them. I stopped when the paper version went away,
which is ages ago now.
tkhattra wrote 1 day ago:
I think they're already available?
e.g.
HTML [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/942572.807045
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Hmm, and yet they were still pushing the digital library
subscription as recently as two months ago.
nickagliano wrote 1 day ago:
Thereâs some nuance to this surrounding the âcreative commonsâ
licensing of these ACM publications.
Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or
CC-BY-NC-ND).
Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will
be creative commons.
Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:
âThank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL
will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1,
2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or
CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses
to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.â
This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational
computer science papers fall into that category.
#FreeAlanTuring
meindnoch wrote 1 day ago:
I don't care, I'll keep using sci-hub.
YouAreWRONGtoo wrote 1 day ago:
I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but
perhaps that's because I don't need a "reputation".
I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which
is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless
piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for
people that are not homo economici.
DamonHD wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
I am doing a PhD (by publication, self-funded) because I want to
improve how we are decarbonising home heating in the UK, and one
target audience is academics, and those papers also support
communications with policy makers and industry. As I have made clear
to my supervisors the PhD would be a nice bauble side-effect of this
climate fixing work.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
> I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything
Why do research if you don't publish it? It's like running a farm and
letting the food rot in the fields every year, nobody eating it. The
value of knowledge is sharing it with others.
In a history of technology and science I read, the author pointed out
that likely there have been many discoveries that, because they
weren't shared outside the village, are lost to time (including
because of a lack of widespread literacy). You might add the arts to
that - how many great stories were lost?
andrenarchy wrote 1 day ago:
CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society).
Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s)
and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their
institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the
established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model
where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each
subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected
revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's
content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees
for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then
also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA
since 2024. Easy.
chris_wot wrote 1 day ago:
You say there are costs, but you don't say what the costs actually
are.
D-Machine wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't
demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from
authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or
basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead
they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their
work is trivial.
KingMob wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple
downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another
commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.)
In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation
of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more
work.
---
That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual
costs for this.
I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange
schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved.
I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and
reduce what they can charge for.
D-Machine wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some
non-trivial typesetting costs.
But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved
problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since
academic journals have weirdly specific input format
requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it
is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting /
formatting.
Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a
triviality: [1] [2] [3]
HTML [1]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009
HTML [2]: https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution...
HTML [3]: https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting...
HTML [4]: https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/a...
KingMob wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
Well, I don't think it's "very obvious", nor do I think "it
is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting /
formatting". I guess I'm not seeing the evidence the same
way.
---
I read your links, and I think the most interesting relevant
one with good numbers is the svpow.com link.
The StackExchange one says "34%" of their cost is "editorial
and production". That includes more than type-setting, so
it's not clear what subfraction is pure type-setting, and
whether it's overpriced or not.
The Lode one is selling Latex templates, and they even say
"Users without LaTeX experience should budget for learning
time or technical assistance." It's more of a low-cost
self-serve alternative, which probably doesn't include
everything a journal does to maintain visual consistency. We
can argue that full-service is overpriced, sure, but this is
different, like complaining about coffee shops because the
vending machine is cheaper.
The Reddit link is about a book author with a pure text
novel, possibly the optimal scenario for cheap type-setting.
---
The svpow.com link was interesting, but, it seems like
type-setting costs are usually bundled in (possibly to
obscure overcharging, sure), so maybe it's better to critique
the overall cost of academic publishing instead of trying to
break out type-setting.
My $0.02, anyway.
denotational wrote 1 day ago:
> Good publishing costs money
Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there,
given the reviewers are unpaid?
gucci-on-fleek wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish
[0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran
by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer
review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is
definitely an atypical example.
[0]:
HTML [1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/
adgjlsfhk1 wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
Surely you charge printing and mailing to the people you are
mailing to though.
gucci-on-fleek wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
Yes, we charge $35 a year (for 3 issues) for printing and
mailing, which is just a little bit more than what it costs us.
bubblethink wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker
to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs,
Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That's what they'll
say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the
market bears.
andrenarchy wrote 1 day ago:
Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming
even more due to production of accessible publications), language
editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and
software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and
fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism
and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial
support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this
also wants a salary.
Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing
is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it
is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money
at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for
example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate
their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so
someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same
sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
D-Machine wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
> Typesetting is a big item
I'm calling bullshit. Look at how annoying the template
requirements are for authors: [1] , and note the stuff around
Word files. Other journals can be much worse.
If any serious typesetting were being done by these journals,
simple plaintext, Markdown (or RMarkdown) or minimal basic LaTeX,
with, admittedly, figures generated to spec, would be more than
enough for typesetters to manage. In fact, if you were doing
serious typesetting, you wouldn't want your users doing a bunch
of formatting and layout themselves, and would demand more
minimal representations of the content only. Instead you have
these ridiculous templates. I am not convinced AT ALL.
Do authors submitting to literary agents have to follow such
absurd rules? I think not. Can modern blogging tools create
beautiful sites with simple Markdown and images? Yes. So why do
academic publishers demand so much from authors? IMO because they
are barely doing anything at all re: typesetting and formatting
and the like.
HTML [1]: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions
kleiba wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
To understand the academic publishing process better, it's a
good idea to look at the four main groups of people involved in
the process: authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers.
The authors write up their research results.
The editors organize the review process together with the
reviewers and the publishing process together with the
publisher.
The reviewers read the papers and write their reviews.
The publishers publish the papers.
Stylesheets are typically provided by the publishers and passed
on to the authors early on. The reason is two-fold: for one,
the publisher wants to produce a high-quality product and
uniformity of layouts and styles is an important factor. But
the second reason has to do with everything that happens before
the publishers even comes into play: common style-sheets also
provide some level of fairness because they make the papers by
different authors comparable to some degree, e.g., via the max
length of a paper.
On top of that, authors often want to present their research in
a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how
their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc.
and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their
documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors
already have an interest in using something more powerful than
Markdown.
But like I wrote in another comment here, in doing so, authors
do not always adhere to the style guides provided by the
publisher - not necessarily maliciously, but the result is the
same. For instance, authors might simply be used to handling
whitespace a certain way - because that's how they always do
it. But if that clashes with the publisher's guidelines, it's
one of the things the publisher has to correct in typesetting.
So, perhaps that's the confusion here also to some degree: the
typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of the cases
on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply enforcing
the rules that were missed by the authors (with the goal of
fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small
perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a
casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
D-Machine wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
> the typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of
the cases on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply
enforcing the rules that were missed by the authors (with the
goal of fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small
perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a
casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
As I said, if this is the case, the vast majority of
typesetting and formatting has clearly been outsourced to
submitters, and this means the amount of actual
typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal
compared to in other domains.
EDIT:
> On top of that, authors often want to present their
research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions
about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with
what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time
tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That
is, the authors already have an interest in using something
more powerful than Markdown.
Yes, generally, I don't want to present my formulas and
figures in the shitty and limited ways the journal demands,
but which would be trivial to present on a website (which is
the only way 99.9% of people access articles now anyway). So
journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally
20+ years outdated.
kleiba wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
> and this means the amount of actual
typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal
compared to in other domains
This doesn't follow logically, and even though I don't know
how it is in other domains, I know for a fact that the
amount of typesetting done for a typical CS journal is
non-trivial.
> So journal requirements here are usually harmful and
generally 20+ years outdated.
I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I
don't expect to be able to change them.
D-Machine wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
> I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I
don't expect to be able to change them.
Much like the journals that have figure requirements for
print, even though the amount of people that have viewed
a figure in print in the last 20 years is an order of
magnitude less than a rounding error.
Typesetting costs in 2025 are trivial, if you swallow
this claim from academic publishers, you are being had:
[1] [2] [3]
HTML [1]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009
HTML [2]: https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revo...
HTML [3]: https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-types...
HTML [4]: https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cd...
kleiba wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
There are smaller publishers whose fees are a lot lower
than ACM's.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience.
> long-term preservation
How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own
files.
> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to
production of accessible publications), language editing,
(meta-)data curation
I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in
reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items
onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission
without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic
for many/most authors?
kleiba wrote 16 hours 48 min ago:
This is difficult in practice. For LaTeX, in theory the
publisher would simply provide their style sheet (.cls) and
maybe some style guidelines, and all the authors have to do is
to adhere to that file and typesetting is done.
The reason this doesn't work in practice is that authors don't
always play nicely, not because of bad intentions, but because
they don't want to cooperate but because of the realities of
life: they don't have the time to study style guidelines in
detail, they use their own auxiliary LaTeX macro collection
because that's what they're used to, or simply because of
oversights. Also, typesetting often includes a whole lot of
meticulous things, if you listed them all in a guide sheet,
that would be a long list of stuff at a level that's too
detailed for authors.
I'm not saying it's impossible for authors to fully follow a
publisher's style guide but there's a reason publishers employ
full time workers who do nothing else but correct submitted
manuscripts. Like many other professions, it's a trained skill.
D-Machine wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
Nonsense. Formatting demands make things worse here, you
could just ask authors to submit unformatted content (e.g.
Markdown or RMarkdown, or utterly minimal LaTeX file, with
references and a bibliography file) and then trivially move
that content into whatever format is required. There are in
fact journals that do this too (i.e. don't have formatting
requirements).
As a submitter applying to multiple journals with arbitrary
formatting requirements, you are often forced to meet
arbitrary and irrelevant (visual) style requirements even
before you are likely to be published, so of course you keep
a base unformatted copy that you modify as needed to satisfy
whatever bullshit policies each random journal demands. This
wastes everyone's time.
The reason submitters don't "play nicely" is because the
publishers' demands ("style guides") are demented here: they
should just be asking for unformatted content (besides
figures), certainly for submissions, and even for accepted
publications: they should actually be doing the work of
formatting and typesetting. But instead they force most of
this on the submitters, to save costs by extorting the
desperation of academics.
capnrefsmmat wrote 1 day ago:
Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors
to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other
typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes
particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements,
many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central,
which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a
structured XML version of papers.
Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any
publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged
PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML
representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse
the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few
other tools support it at all.
D-Machine wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
> Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of
authors to do typesetting is pretty limited.
Since this is obviously true, and yet since most journals
(with some exceptions) demand you follow tedious formatting
requirements or highly restrictive templates, this suggests,
in fact, that journals are outsourcing the vast majority of
their typesetting and formatting to submitters, and doing
only the bare minimum themselves.
capnrefsmmat wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
Most of the tedious formatting requirements do not match
what the final typeset article looks like. The requirements
are instead theoretically to benefit peer reviewers, e.g.,
by having double-spaced lines so they can write their
comments on the paper copy that was mailed to them back
when the submission guidelines were written in the 1950s.
The smarter journals have started accepting submissions in
any format on the first round, and then only require enough
formatting for the typesetters to do their job.
adgjlsfhk1 wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
I bet if you offer to waive a $1500 fee for authors who
submit a latex version, a lot of grad students will learn it
pretty fast.
0xWTF wrote 1 day ago:
Awesome, thanks for posting your experience with an interesting
model.
rbanffy wrote 1 day ago:
Now if only the IEEE did the sameâ¦
DonaldPShimoda wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of discussion about the benefits/drawbacks of open access
publishing, but I don't see anybody talking about the other thing
that's coming along with this commitment to open access: the ACM is
introducing a "premium" membership tier behind which various features
of the Digital Library will be paywalled. From their info page [0],
"premium" features include:
* Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery
* AI-generated article summaries
* Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
* Advanced search
* Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and
citations received
* Bulk citation exports and PDF downloads
The AI-generated article summaries has been getting a lot of discussion
in my social circles. They have apparently fed many (all?) papers into
some LLM to generate summaries... which is absurd when you consider
that practically every article has an abstract as part of its text and
submission. These abstract were written by the authors and have been
reviewed more than almost any other part of the articles, so they are
very unlikely to contain errors. In contrast, multiple of my colleagues
have found errors of varying scales in the AI-generated summaries of
their own papers â many of which are actually longer than the
existing abstracts.
In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles
that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the
ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate
information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as
publishers of these materials.
I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium"
features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1],
especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are
discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than
closed-access publishing.
[0] [1] The Digital Library homepage ( [2] ) features a banner right
now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital
Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are
available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."
HTML [1]: https://dl.acm.org/premium
HTML [2]: https://dl.acm.org/
kleiba wrote 16 hours 27 min ago:
> * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
Also AI-generated, presumably.
th0ma5 wrote 1 day ago:
I came here with this perspective and it made the rest of the thread
feel like submarine PR cleanup for this mess. Perhaps they can afford
to keep their high profits because of AI company money?
jldugger wrote 1 day ago:
I'm kinda okay with putting the AI slop behind a paywall if it means
nobody will actually see it.
b33j0r wrote 1 day ago:
There will be customers even though it is a useless feature tier.
Monetizing knowledge-work is nearly impossible if you want everyone
to be rational about it. You gotta go for irrational customers like
university and giant-org contracts, and that will happen here
because of institutional inertia.
rnewme wrote 1 day ago:
Great news. I've bookmarked an article back in 2009 but didn't want to
pay $80 for it.
logifail wrote 1 day ago:
I wish there were more open discussions about how "Journal Impact
Factor" came to be so important.
It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work
and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large
part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web
of Science/Journal Citation Reports).
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
It's flawed, but what is a better idea? We definitely need curation.
specialp wrote 1 day ago:
It is almost unanimously agreed upon that impact factor is a flawed
way of assessing scientific output, and there are a lot of ideas on
how this could be done better. None of them have taken hold.
Publishers are mostly a reputation cartel.
Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation
data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data
freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward
citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.
TheRealPomax wrote 1 day ago:
Are you going to reverse your nonsense "these publications already come
with a summary, so we've added a worse, AI generated summary and making
that the first thing you see instead" decision though?
Tarucho wrote 1 day ago:
Will they end up using ads? (not joking)
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
Ok that's good but ... what exactly will be open accessed?
Do they keep a lot of what is important or interesting? I
really don't know right now. They should have also added
the relevancy of that announcement; right now I just don't
know what will all be opened, so I hope to find this information
in the comments here.
justincormack wrote 1 day ago:
its a huge amount of high quality content. See [1] . The older stuff
was opened a few years back.
HTML [1]: https://dl.acm.org
jhallenworld wrote 1 day ago:
Come on IEEE...
elashri wrote 1 day ago:
Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business
model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is
basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and
mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that).
That's because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees
(thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer
reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in
neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.
IanCal wrote 16 hours 14 min ago:
I like the way that people add âa friendly reminderâ like
theyâre just jogging your memory of a well known fact.
Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They
are not foisting this on people because itâs a new great scheme
theyâve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.
DoctorOetker wrote 1 day ago:
but what prevents scientists (as both authors and reviewers) from
banding together and creating journals that don't require money
(freeing money for research budgets)?
pks016 wrote 1 day ago:
Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals.
My supervisor doesn't have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for
publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad
students' summer salary
Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my
research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very
wealthy people.
observationist wrote 1 day ago:
We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all
taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to
license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the
official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3
people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by
pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year
would go back to grants, or upgrades.
It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking,
no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable
paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a
simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking
to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss
elsewhere.
It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things
the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith
actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return
for billions of dollars.
warkdarrior wrote 1 day ago:
It'd be flooded in seconds with millions of AI-generated articles.
arXiv is already suffering from this.
abhisuri97 wrote 1 day ago:
this is pubmed. Most papers that are funded by NIH research are
available on pubmed if the main publisher gives access to the full
text (after some set embargo period...usually around a year).
bondarchuk wrote 1 day ago:
I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open
system is it does away with the difference between "prestigious"
and "non-prestigious" journals. "Prestigiousness" is actually a
really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from
the ground up in an open and fair system. It's almost like
"prestige" can only emerge in a system of selfish/profit-motivated
actors.
observationist wrote 1 day ago:
Prestige, in an honest system, would be a great signal. The
problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately
gets gamed. Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the
available options. A journal could still achieve prestige by
curating and selecting the best available studies and research -
in the proposed system, nothing is preventing them from licensing
material like any other potential platform or individual.
Profit motivated exclusivity under private control resulted in
the enshittification vortex of adtech doom we're currently all
drowning in. If you want prestige - top ten status in Google
search results - you need to play the game they invented. Same
goes for all of academia.
People stopped optimizing for good websites and utility and craft
and started optimizing for keywords and technicalities and
glitches in the matrix that bumped their ranking.
People stopped optimizing for beneficial novel research and
started optimizing for topical grants, politically useful
subjects, p hacking, and outright making shit up as long as it
was valuable to the customers (grant agencies and institutions
seeking particular outcomes, etc.)
Google is trash, and scientific publication is a flaming dumpster
fire of reproducibility failure, fraud, politically motivated
weasel wording nonsense, and profit motivated selective studies
on medical topics that benefit pharma and chemical companies and
the like.
Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be
under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for
profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different
incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting
publications.
It's incredibly cheap and easy to host for free. It benefits
everyone the most and harms the public the least to do it like
that, and if a prestigious platform tries to push narrative
bending propaganda, it can be directly and easily contradicted
using the same open and public mechanisms. And if it happens in
the other direction, with solid, but politically or commercially
inconvenient research saying something that isn't appreciated by
those with wealth or power, that research can be openly
reproduced and replicated, all out in the open.
bondarchuk wrote 16 hours 19 min ago:
>The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal
immediately gets gamed.
I agree, but..
>Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available
options.
this does not necessarily follow.
>A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and
selecting the best available studies and research
See, this is just the kind of thing that I think will just not
work when organized top-down like that. "Oh, we'll just make a
prestigious journal by only letting the best papers in" -
everyone could say that, but what would induce the authors of
the best papers to submit them to your specific journal at all
in the first place? Currently it's the fact that it's already
prestigious, and this reputation has grown over many years
through informal social processes that are very hard to codify.
>Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be
under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for
profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen
different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the
resulting publications.
Of course I agree, just to be clear I am a great proponent of
openly accessible science - just think the prestige thing is an
interesting corner case.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
It is a kind of fuzzy signal though. Maybe a better replacement
could be found. Like, if we all had PGP keys, we could just sign
the article that we like, right? Then, a web-of-prestige that
more accurately represents the field could be generated. ORCID
could manage it, haha.
bondarchuk wrote 1 day ago:
Well, yes, this is exactly the kind of well-intentioned
technical solution that just will not work at all when it comes
in contact with human nature. "Oh boy my paper got accepted in
Nature!" vs - "oh boy some people on the internet signed my pgp
thing!". Just not the same.
bee_rider wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
I mean⦠if somebody famous in your field signed your paper,
you might be excited. Reviewer #2 is just some anonymous
figure.
bondarchuk wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
I think the difference is with a journal like Nature people
are competing for strictly limited real-estate. The famous
academic could still sign however many papers they like..
warkdarrior wrote 1 day ago:
Publishing collusion rings would greatly enjoy using this
web-of-prestige:
HTML [1]: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-mass...
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
Those already occur though.
I wonder if we could form a graph that would make a collusion
ring intuitively visible (Iâm not sure whatâbetween
papers, authors, and signingsâshould be the edges and the
nodes, though). Making these relationships explicit should
help discover this kind of stuff, right?
Another problem with my idea is that a lot of famous
luminaries wouldnât bother playing the game, or are dead
already. But, all we can really do is set up a game for those
whoâd like to playâ¦
igornotarobot wrote 1 day ago:
> Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new
business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it
is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private
entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money...
While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant
difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia.
Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per
article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my
taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to
read the papers.
I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic
conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors,
too.
bigfishrunning wrote 1 day ago:
Where are you getting such inexpensive textbooks???
Kidding, i agree $30-50 per article is outrageous.
stuffn wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah was about to say the last textbook I paid for was $380
dollars and it was a custom edition where the author was also the
professor.
The entire education system is a racket.
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that
produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open
Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer
and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are
the ones that generally do not get paid for their work.
Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication
model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do
not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general
public despite the papers being produced with public money (and
despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money).
Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to
the public.
DamonHD wrote 1 day ago:
Authors may NOT be paid at all for their work, or may even pay to
do it.
I am a self-funded PhD student and no one paid me for the work that
went into my open access paper. As it happens in this case the
journal waived the publication fee, so no one paid anyone anything
except I suppose the nominal pro-rata portion of my university fees
that I paid.
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
That is true also. The pre-pub route may be your best bet if that
is a concern. One shoe does not fit all feet. I am only trying to
argue the merits of the Open Access model. It is certainly not
perfect.
forgotpwd16 wrote 1 day ago:
>PLoS [...]
At low costs of $2k~$3k per publication[0]. Elsevier closed-access
journals will charge you $0 to publish your paper.
>Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication
model.
Elsevier is also[1] moving to APC for their journals because is
better business.
>The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public
despite the papers being produced with public money
Journals (usually) forbid you of sharing the published (supposedly
edited) version of a paper. You're allowed to share the
pre-published draft (see arXiv). Institutions could (and some
indeed do) supply those drafts on their own.
>Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability
to the public.
At the expense of making research more expensive and hence more
exclusive. It's money rather quality that matters now. Thus it
isn't unsurprising that Frontiers & MDPI, two very known
open-access proponent publishers, are also very known to publishing
garbage. It's ironic that once was said that any journal asking you
for money to publish your paper is predatory, yet nowadays somehow
this is considered best practice.
[0]: [1]:
HTML [1]: https://plos.org/fees/
HTML [2]: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
One last post.
The garbage thing is really interesting. I'm going to propose
another reason for garbage is Academia's reliance on publication
as the primary means for giving promotions and judging peoples
work. This leads to all kinds of disfunction.
Was it Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs that said his University
wanted to fire him because he didn't publish frequently enough?
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
Better busness or are their customers demanding it? PLoS is a
Non-Profit - feel free to look up how much they make. I believe
it is public record.
If researchers cannot pay the APC then PLoS often reduces the
fee. Also - half of that grant money is used by the Institution
as administrative overhead. An part of that overhead is paying
Elsevier for journal access. If you want to decrease the cost of
research that may be a better place to start.
I agree that volume often tends to result in garbage but the
review is supposed to lessen that. Again that garbage did get
funded some how.
I am not pushing PLoS - they are simply a publisher I am familiar
with that uses this model.
dfsegoat wrote 1 day ago:
It seems that perhaps neither are inherently 'good models'? What
would an ideal alternative look like?
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
It is certainly not perfect. Competition/Choice is good. It is
interesting that people do not understand their grant money is
paying for it regardless. Either an upfront cost or through the
administrative overhead the Institution gets from the grant.
ajjahs wrote 1 day ago:
non profit publisher or even better a goverment service.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
Why was this comment flagged? Thereâs plenty of room to
disagree with it, sure, but it isnât offensive or repulsive
or anything. If anything, Iâd love to see it argued
againstâ¦
Jtsummers wrote 20 hours 37 min ago:
It wasn't flagged, they're shadowbanned. [dead] without
[flagged] is not the same as [flagged][dead]. [dead] alone is
shadowbanned or maybe mod killed, [flagged][dead] means that
it was flagged to death by users.
They (or someone) needs to message the mods about it, it
looks like they've been shadowbanned since their first
comment 6 months ago.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
I think the Elsevier model will eventually be deprecated, at the
least for the open sector of society (aka taxpayers money). People
demand that when they pay taxes, they should not have to pay again
due to Elsevier and I think this is a reasonable demand. Many
researchers also support this.
privong wrote 1 day ago:
> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more
lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on
research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by
taxpayer money
In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep
in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged
subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities
and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money
from overheads charged to grants).
tialaramex wrote 1 day ago:
And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy
things you're familiar with if you've been say a cable TV
subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good
thing and saying that's a 5-for-1 offer when actually it's just an
excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted.
This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access
is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries
to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible
price.
2cynykyl wrote 1 day ago:
"Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the
highest possible price" This is brilliant. So much information
packed into one sentence.
seanhunter wrote 1 day ago:
I have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid
for any peer review I've ever done and none of those was for an open
access publication.
tokai wrote 1 day ago:
Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have
build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to
Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open
Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more.
Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to
ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and
ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for
decades to dilute the concept.
elashri wrote 1 day ago:
I don't disagree that the ultimate goal is have open and free
access is a noble goal. I just point our that what is happening in
practice is that it is being taken as a new business model that
pays on average more for the publishers. I'm not sure my comment
implies I criticize the open access concept and I apologize if it
is not clear.
alexpotato wrote 1 day ago:
This article about how to go from manual processes to automation is
still one of the greatest ACM publications ever written:
HTML [1]: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520
nakedneuron wrote 1 day ago:
Is this relevant?
HTML [1]: https://typst.app/blog/2025/automated-generation
YesThatTom2 wrote 1 day ago:
Wow! Thank you so much! Quite a compliment!
alexpotato wrote 1 day ago:
It's so great that I've shared it with every Trade Desk, DevOps,
SRE and Infra team I've ever worked with.
jhallenworld wrote 1 day ago:
So this link is interesting for a different reason: look at the
references at the end of the paper. It's awesome that the references
include URLs. IMHO, old papers should all be updated to include such
hyperlinks.
I'm pleased that the references to other ACM papers do work.
But try to click on this one:
Bainbridge, L. 1983. Ironies of automation. Automatica 19(6):
775-779; [1] Fail! No way to read the paper without paying or
pirating by using scihub (and even if you do get the .pdf via scihub,
its references are not hyperlinks). This does not help humanity, it
makes us look like morons. FFS, even the music industry was able to
figure this out.
HTML [1]: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0713/bb9d9b138e4e0a15406006...
YesThatTom2 wrote 1 day ago:
Iâll see what I can do!
jhallenworld wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
I'm not blaming you. By providing links, your citations go beyond
what is required for academic papers.
Would it be rude to print the link " [1] " but actually link to
[2] when you click it? :-)
The DOI is key, then you can use a browser extension to do it,
for example:
HTML [1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8
HTML [2]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8
HTML [3]: https://github.com/natir/Redirector_doi_sci-hub
nycerrrrrrrrrr wrote 1 day ago:
Conflicted. Obviously open access is great, but it's never been that
difficult to find most papers either on arxiv or the author's website.
And I despise the idea of paying to publish, especially since unlike
other fields the "processing" required for CS papers is minimal (e.g.,
we handle our own formatting). FWIW, USENIX conference papers are both
open access and free to publish.
My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to
the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
kleiba wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
> e.g., we handle our own formatting
I used to work for a small publisher some years ago, and while this
is true to some degree, we spent a lot of effort doing additional
formatting or correcting formatting mistakes. For a typical journal
publication, this process alone takes weeks if you're aiming at a
high-quality publication.
On top of that, there are a lot of small things that you typically
don't get if a paper is just put on the author's website, such as
e.g. long-term archiving, a DOI, integration with services like dblp,
metadata curation, etc.
Now, to what degree these features are an added value to you
personally varies from person to person. Some people or even
workshops are totally fine with simply publishing the PDFs written by
the authors on a website, and there's nothing wrong with that, ymmv.
leoc wrote 1 day ago:
The Digital Library contains a lot of older material which predates
the Web and has often never been put online anywhere else: old Joint
Computer Conference papers and so on.
Jtsummers wrote 1 day ago:
> My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in
response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
ACM started this open access effort back in 2020, I don't think that
LLM generated papers were on their mind when they started it.
ryeguy_24 wrote 1 day ago:
When I read the publications (the ACM magazine), I swear sometimes
the content feels LLM generated. Does anyone else get that
impression? In general, I'm not very impressed with the content
(I'm used to WIRED, btw).
leoc wrote 1 day ago:
And they spent years resisting pressure for open access before
that: this has been in the air for a long time.
checker659 wrote 1 day ago:
Now, only if IEEE would follow suit.
poorman wrote 1 day ago:
This is huge. A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer
science optimizations. The ACM programming competitions in college are
some of my fondest memories!
sundarurfriend wrote 1 day ago:
> A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science
optimizations.
Note that older articles have already been open access for a while
now:
> April 7, 2022
> ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of
its publishing program. These articles, published between 1951 and
the end of 2000, are now open and freely available to view and
download via the ACM Digital Library.
-
HTML [1]: https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-b...
dhruv3006 wrote 1 day ago:
This is great news!
trainyperson wrote 1 day ago:
The financials of open access are interesting.
Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge
authors an âArticle Processing Chargeâ (APC) which for ACM is $1450
in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income
countries get a discount. [1] Authors are often associated with
institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the
author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now
instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay
a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.
1.
HTML [1]: https://authors.acm.org/open-access
bluenose69 wrote 4 hours 40 min ago:
I've been in academia for more decades than I'd like to state, and I
have never heard of an institute that covered article processing
charges. I work in a natural science. Maybe things are different in
computing fields, though.
ychnd wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
This is called "gold open access" and is a scam.
It's just journals hijacking the open access initiative and raping
it.
cs_throwaway wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
The computer science that matters the most today â- machine
learning, vision, NLP â- is open access without the fees because
the main confs are not ACM. (Vision has some in IEEE.)
I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI
summaries.
shellac wrote 15 hours 57 min ago:
> Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge
authors an âArticle Processing Chargeâ (APC)
Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are
other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere
for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).
nickwrb wrote 17 hours 40 min ago:
Thatâs not the only option, though. There is also institutional
membership, which is basically the same as the previous subscription
model, just pitched the other way around. Authors whose institutions
are members donât have to pay the processing charge.
Hereâs the list of current members:
HTML [1]: https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants
RuslanL wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
How is $1450 justified in modern times?
Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only
expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review
system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of
magnitude higher number come from?
matwood wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
You can look at the finances of the ACM here:
HTML [1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/1...
D-Machine wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
Laundering prestige. Journals do almost nothing, and serious
researchers (by which I mean, people who actually care about
advancing knowledge, not careerist academics) haven't cared much
about journal prestige for over a decade, at least.
skirge wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
value creation - it's not a hamburger but something serious!
slow_typist wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
It isnât, but to get a full professorship, you need to publish in
higher ranked journals. APC-Open-Access is just another iteration
of the parasitic business model of the few big publishers. In the
end, universities pay the same amounts to the publishers as before,
or even more. This business model can only be overcome if and when
academia changes the rules for assessment of application to higher
ranked academic positions. There are journals that are entirely run
by scientists and scientific libraries. Only in this model the peer
review and publishing platform becomes a commodity.
titzer wrote 1 day ago:
As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and
seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the
publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to
the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process.
They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget
(subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough
attendees) and the author fees.
For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers'
duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright
forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and
nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers,
and captions being incorrectly above figures.
Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and
subtractive from the Scientific process.
D-Machine wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
Agreed. Also the claims that the fees are for typesetting and the
like are highly suspect, given how specific so many journals'
formatting requirements are. As poster above says, if they were
spending any significant amount of money on typesetting and the
like, you wouldn't have strange nags about margins and
capitalization and other formatting nonsense, so it is clear they
basically do almost nothing on this front.
If they did any serious typesetting, they'd be fine with a simple
Markdown or e.g. RMarkdown file, BibTeX and/or other standard
format bibliography file, and figures meeting certain
specifications, but instead, you often get demands for Word files
that meet specific text size and margin requirements, or to use
LaTeX templates. There are exceptions to this, of course.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
Are you talking only about conference papers? What about those
submitted to Nature, Science, etc.?
And who will curate the best research, especially for people
outside your field? I can't follow the discussion in every field.
aethor wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
Researchers are curating for the editors, and are often not even
paid for it. So the value that the editors bring is often low at
best.
mmooss wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
That implies that papers all have roughly the same value, which
is certainly not true.
schlauerfox wrote 1 day ago:
This is on purpose, the industry was forged by someone explicitly
trying to get rich off of a public resource.
HTML [1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/mz/podcast/part-one-robert-maxw...
humanfromearth9 wrote 1 day ago:
How do independent researchers, doing research after hours, in the
evening or the weekend, finance this?
segmondy wrote 1 day ago:
your website
pks016 wrote 1 day ago:
You don't :( You look for alternatives. You get discriminated based
on wealth
psychoslave wrote 1 day ago:
I don't, I publish directly on Wikiversity. There it's available to
read, use and edit by every follow human with an internet
connection. Those willing to contribute with feedback can do so
through discussion pages.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
Most reputable journals will waive the fees in this case, though
the easier route if you are in a rich country where this is less
likely is to partner with an institution. They get to add to their
research output stats and you get your funding, a win win.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
For those looking for examples, see the clickspring youtube
channel on the "Antikythera mechanism", he is a skilled
watchmaker and he works with academics on actual reseach whilst
building a replica, despite having no acadeic affiliation himself
(at least that I know of, feel free to correct me if I am wrong).
jna_sh wrote 1 day ago:
Some journals support âgreen open accessâ, where you can share
your article minus the journalâs formatting on open repositories
etc, sometimes some time after publication, which is usually free.
I canât see any mention of this from the ACM though
pca006132 wrote 1 day ago:
But this is not related. You still have to pay the APC.
quentindanjou wrote 1 day ago:
This is quite a good thing, as you will no longer have to buy all
the research papers to advance your own research.
The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in
case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you
finance that or choose to publish in another journal.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now
rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more
readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality
of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching
the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen
quantity over quality.
Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions
can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and
I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.
sheepscreek wrote 11 hours 56 min ago:
Processing != Publishing (at least I hope not).
zwnow wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
You had the quantity argument as well when it was about
accumulation of subscribers. As a bigger variety of content also
attracts a bigger variety of people.
beambot wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
> Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers
Publishers have a finite capacity based on the number of credible
peer reviewers. In the past, it felt very exploitative as an
academic doing peer review for the economic benefit of publishing
houses. I'd much rather have "public good" publishers with open
access -- at least I feel like the "free" labor is aligned with the
desired outcome.
jojobas wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
The whole publication model is broken, not just the incentives. It
used to be researchers eager to share their new findings with the
few hundred people that could understand them, now it's throngs of
PhD students grinding their way to degrees and postdocs trying to
secure tenure. The journals are flooded with nonsense and actual
researchers resort to word of mouth point out valuable papers to
each other.
D-Machine wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
This is accurate and known to anyone actually in the area.
aimanbenbaha wrote 1 day ago:
What about a better deal: Scientific knowledge shouldn't be a
for-profit venture to pursue.
NetMageSCW wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
Do you work for free?
theptip wrote 1 day ago:
Disagree. The journals are now acting like a paid certification. If
they admit any old slop, who would pay to submit their papers?
The service they are providing is peer review and applying a
reputable quality bar to submissions.
Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you
publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why
would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish
(non-revenue-accruing) publication?
pwlm wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
Reputable quality bar isn't the right metric. Quality is a better
metric. To the extent it can be estimated, impact is another.
Neither of these require journals specifically.
A different way to look at this is to question what "old slop"
actually means.
The reason not to publish in Nature is that it might take a long
time to get everything right in the paper to publish, to the
point it takes years to get it read. Publishing fewer results
faster spreads the results faster.
TomasBM wrote 1 day ago:
Small correction to your point: they perhaps provide a reason for
peer review to happen, but it's scientists themselves who
coordinate and provide the actual peer review.
That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to
organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But
I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.
kqr wrote 1 day ago:
> Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as
opposed to having more readers.
That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If
authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals
that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be
those that focus on their readership.
KeplerBoy wrote 15 hours 13 min ago:
Authors don't pay for that personally though. Nobody bats an eye
at the $1500 publishing fee for a mediocre paper, that could have
been a blog post, because the institution is happy to bolster its
publication count.
Heck, nobody even bats an eye if that publication is to be
presented at a conference with a few thousand bucks in travel
costs.
youainti wrote 1 day ago:
This would probably depend heavily on how tenure decisions
handles publishing. If it is heavily biased towards quantity of
publishing, then that won't matter as much as you can "pay to win
your paycheck".
If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should
work better.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
> If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for
journals that have readers
On the other hand predatory journals make a killing from APCs so
there is some market for journals with no readers.
samarthr1 wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
My university had made it mandatory for students to publish
atleast 1 paper to graduate from their bachelors degree, and
would pay all the associated fees.
Most kids unfortunately did end up paying to publish.
rorytbyrne wrote 1 day ago:
I disagree. We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have
decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I
think these new incentives are exactly what we want:
1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are
incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors
(i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.
2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will
relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of
glam-journals - Good.
3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move
to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
pessimizer wrote 8 hours 28 min ago:
> we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of
quality.
That's literally all I want them to do. I would love if they
dwindled away to simply being monthly blog entries with magnet
links to the articles, maybe with an introductory editorial.
We refuse to do this, because we have deeply integrated journals
into a system of compensation for everyone involved. They're just
magazines; "journal" is the beginning of the pomposity.
You could already publish a "fusion" journal where you link to
the best articles in your field, and publish reviews of them - or
even go back and forth with authors who want to be listed in your
journal for a paper that they're about to publish. Outside of
salaries, it would cost as much as a wordpress/patreon blog, or
really, just a monthly twitter thread. The reason this doesn't
happen is because it doesn't integrate with the academic
financial system.
The only thing worthwhile about the journals is their brands, and
the major ones in a lot of their fields (especially medicine)
have ground their brands into dust through low quality. They
continue through inertia: once anyone has ever made money doing
something in the West, it will be preserved by any means
necessary, because it's worth giving up part of that cash in
order not to lose all of it. Scams are only ever defeated by
bigger scams.
Nobody who is only important because they published in The Lancet
will ever tolerate the devaluing of the idea of publishing in The
Lancet, unless you give him a stipend for being involved in the
next thing. Consequently, you're not going to be able to get a
job from being published in Bob's Blog, no matter the quality of
the peer review. Hence $1500 open access fees.
pwlm wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
A different way to not require journals to be the arbiters of
quality is to let the truth itself be the arbiter of quality
instead of designate gatekeepers.
1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select
few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty
specifically.
2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to
spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.
newswasboring wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
> we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of
quality.
At that point why even have a journal, let's just put everything
as a Reddit post and be done with it. We will get comment
abilities for free.
Maintaining quality standards is a good service, the journal
system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.
rorytbyrne wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
> At that point why even have a journal
Great question.
> the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check
we have left.
I wish I could agree but Nature et al continually publish bad,
attention-grabbing science, while holding back the good science
because it threatens the research programmes that gave the
editorial board successful careers.
"Isn't perfect" is a massive understatement.
Al-Khwarizmi wrote 16 hours 58 min ago:
> We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that
journals should not be the arbiters of quality.
In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.
If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally
useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a
decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from
paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone
checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to
check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no
need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper
structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission
systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that
introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).
I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist
precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other
value at all.
rorytbyrne wrote 13 hours 20 min ago:
Yes exactly. Right now they are arbiters of quality but they
shouldn't be, and the move towards Open Access is changing
their role.
cmrx64 wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
semanticscholar is a better one stop shop than arxiv
Al-Khwarizmi wrote 13 hours 31 min ago:
Semantic Scholar is for search, but you can't just go there
and look at everything that has been uploaded today as you do
in arXiv, right? I know many people who check arXiv every day
(myself included) but not Semantic Scholar, although I guess
this might be highly field-specific.
What follows is totally offtopic, but to be honest I don't
check Semantic Scholar much because I have a grudge with it.
Profiles just don't work for authors with accented characters
in the name (such as myself), papers get dispersed between
multiple automatically-generated profiles. The staff is very
helpful and will manually merge profiles for me when asked,
but then I publish a new paper and wham, instead of
incorporating it into the merged profile the system creates a
new one. This has been going on for 6 years (if not more) and
still unfixed.
For all the criticism that Google Scholar gets, I highly
prefer it because it gets that right. It's extremely annoying
when tools give you extra work for committing the sin of not
having an Anglo-Saxon name (this is much more common than
unaffected people would expect) and just don't seem to care
to fix it.
dajt wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a
peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for
professionals.
For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need
a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed
articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written
two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.
I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not
employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer.
But the rules of the organisation are thus.
Al-Khwarizmi wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
> I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having
published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem
for professionals.
Yes, in fact this is mainly what I meant with "quality
badge". It's a badge mostly for instutitional bean-counting
processes. Fellow scientists don't need it that much,
typically we can separate the wheat from the chaff with a
very quick skim.
hnben wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
> which is a problem for professionals
dont worry, leadership will find another metric to turn into
a target, after the old metric has stopped working for a
decade or two.
dr_dshiv wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
In my field, journals subsist precisely as targets for a PhD. 3
journal publications and you can become a doc.
patmorgan23 wrote 20 hours 2 min ago:
If publishing the most papers is the goal why do we even need
journals? We have blogs and preprint servers if Volume is your
goal.
Journals should absolutely play a role in maintaining quality and
curating what they publish.
DistractionRect wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
> If publishing the most papers is the goal why do we even need
journals?
For discoverability. Someone's trivial finding may be someone
else's key to a major breakthrough, but little good it does if
it can't be easily found
Al-Khwarizmi wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
In my field, arXiv (free preprint server) is actually much
more discoverable than journals. It tends to be on top of
Google searchers, many people (myself include) check it out
daily, and few people even check journals (why would you
check dozens of different ones if everyone posts their work
on arXiv?).
teleforce wrote 13 hours 51 min ago:
> everyone posts their work on arXiv
Not everyone.
Do you know that you can get rejected by arXiv if they
think your publication is not worthy of their publication.
It's an open access journal masquerading as pre-print
server. There are other much more open pre-print server.
morby wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
This isnât being realistic. The major benefit of these is
peer review. You arenât going to have enough people to peer
review the work of a massively open and public publication
system.
On top of that the chance of finding something as you suggest
becomes that much more difficult. Smaller findings get
published now in a more controlled scenario and get lost in
the stream.
Major journals are a net positive for surfacing important
science.
pwlm wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
Peer-review can also occur from non-gatekeepers, from
non-experts. You realize you posted this on a massively
open and public publication system, right?
Non-experts sometimes bring perspectives that gatekeepers
are blind to.
notarobot123 wrote 17 hours 39 min ago:
Yet "peer review" would absolutely scale if it were
actually the review of peers (and not just an editorial
board). A large number of publications where submissions
are reviewed by previous and prospective authors would be
much like how open source peer review works, though not
without its own set of issues.
Discovery is a search problem and its pretty clear that we
have the technical capacity to solve that problem if there
is enough of a signal from wide-spread peer review.
Major journals become those that re-publish and report on
the big debates and discoveries of the actually
peer-reviewed journals and this would be the work of
"journalists".
epigramx wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
Peer review success is not the rule of the owner of a company
but the acceptance you get from peers.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very
limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I
don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.
They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you
suggest and why are they better?
Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise
to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds'
is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is
not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or
Twitter.
heisenbit wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
Maybe we should pay the ones that put in the work and leverage
their experience to judge the quality which would be the
reviewers. In this age of disintermediation journals add little
value in providing infrastructure or paying (if at all)
reviewers and that money is in any case mostly public money.
rorytbyrne wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
> Who else do you suggest and why are they better?
The arbiters are just our colleagues, at the end of the day.
The journal is just the organisational mechanism, one of many
possible mechanisms.
For example, I follow a weekly reading list ( [1] ) published
by a group of motor control labs at Western University. Those
people are my arbiters of quality.
I want to continue having arbiters, and I want it to be the
same people (broadly speaking). I just don't want them to be
organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead
to concentrated power over scientific narratives.
HTML [1]: https://superlab.ca
mmooss wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
That sounds fine, though I'd add the consideration that the
further someone is from your field, the more that an arbiter
and a highly filtered reading list become necessities. A
scholar in another field isn't part of the daily conversation
in yours and doesn't have time to get involved or read up on
on it - and, without arbiters, they'd need to do in every
field except their own. And the scientifically literate
public has no hope - will they find the Western University
list? For every field they're interested in? And read every
list in every field?
A few central arbiters of the best research - e.g. Nature and
Science - make science accessible outside your field, and
outside professional science. Even reading those two
publications is too much every week, with all the other
reading, other activities, family, responsibilties, etc. on
top of career.
> I just don't want them to be organised around journals
because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power
over scientific narratives.
I don't care if it's journals, though people often assume
that shifting power away from the current flawed institution
to a new one will resolve the problems. The probems are
inherent to power itself. We need a different structure with
different incentives if we want a different outcome.
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
So what service to the journals provide to the people who are
paying them?
rorytbyrne wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
You pay them, they give your work a stamp of prestige that is
mostly unrelated to the quality of your work.
RossBencina wrote 1 day ago:
> journals should not be the arbiters of quality
It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the
publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see,
the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a
quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on
your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to
abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I
fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at
large.
beezle wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
At the end of the day, I expect a journal that I pay for to be
better than arXiv and that means quality control. Few people
have the time to self-vet everything they read to the extent
that it should be in absence of other eyes
SoleilAbsolu wrote 1 day ago:
I agree, and...
Completely off topic, but thanks for creating AudioMulch, I
don't use it actively anymore but it totally revolutionized how
I approach working with sound!
rorytbyrne wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed, they are irrelevant. Right now they maintain an
administrative monopoly over the peer review process, that
makes them de-facto arbiters even if it's peers doing the work.
Journals should either become tech companies offering (and
charging for) new and exciting ways to present scientific
research, or simply stop existing.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
These are all valid points. I think we agree we are just looking
at different things, I argued if journals maintained their
arbiter quality then the system is bad, but you rightly point out
that this could finally grip this quality out of their hands, and
so it could be good for science overall actually. I think these
are fair points :)
rorytbyrne wrote 13 hours 14 min ago:
Haha yes I jumped off in a very different direction. The points
you raised are very much valid in the short-term. But longer
term, I think journals charging authors for some kind of
enhanced research presentation service is actually quite
valuable, so the short-term negative effects might lead to a
good outcome for the industry down the line - we hope.
j_maffe wrote 1 day ago:
I can tell you for a fact that points 2 and 3 usually do not hold
simply because publishing fees are directly correlated with the
"prestige" perception of the journal.
__MatrixMan__ wrote 1 day ago:
It still wouldn't be perfect, but I'd like to see a system that
rewarded publishers and authors for coming up with work that was a
load bearing citation for other work (by different authors on
different publishers, i.e. ones with no ulterior motive for having
chosen it as a source).
Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the
publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do
the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.
pwlm wrote 14 hours 52 min ago:
I built something like this but it didn't get users. Replying to
an author for the valuable info they posted would pay the author
and it also accepted public payments.
An AI or search engine that identified the value of a
contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money
based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.
__MatrixMan__ wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
I can imagine that adoption was hard to achieve gradually. I
figure you'd need a bunch of universities to get together and
all at once say to the publishers:
> The only way we'll pay you ever again is through {the
protocol}, deal with it.
If people just sought out and participated in better incentive
alignment under the expectation that things would be better if
only everybody did so... Well then things would already be
better and we wouldn't be dreaming these dreams in the first
place.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
You know, we briefly had this with the h-index, and now h-index
manipulation is so rife that it is no longer highly correlated
with successful academic careers
__MatrixMan__ wrote 1 day ago:
I see, I hadn't seen the h-index before. I guess that's
Goodhart's law for you.
There's got to be ways to improve things though.
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
The people that pay are the Institutions (Universities mainly). Not
the readers. The publications are sold to them as bundles even if
the Institution does not want all the journals.
pwlm wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
Many if not most of the readers are grad students. Arguably
they're the people who pay that indirectly in increased tuition
fees.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes you are correct, however I don't understand how this relates
to my point, do you mind clarifying? I'd also caveat that the
library (the purchaser of these bundles at most universities)
often buys bundles based on requests from academics (more
specifically research groups/departments) at the university, thus
the readers do have some sway over which are purchased.
strangattractor wrote 1 day ago:
I do not know specifics of bundling agreements (shocker that I
admit not knowing something:). I do know that libraries at some
Institutions have started to provide funds to their researchers
to pay the APCs. The library then goes to the Open Access
publisher and negotiates bulk APC deals if they commit to a
certain number of publications. Sort of a win win grant wise.
This does not necessarily guaranty publication but if it does
not get published you don't pay (processing submissions is an
expense Open Access publishers incurs).
I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that
the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long
that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models
are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts
access to information.
I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that
incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I
would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any
publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication
in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and
research money.
I would also argue that there are other problems within
research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers
that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you
for the honest discussion.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for clarifying, I agree with you for sure.
nairboon wrote 1 day ago:
The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too
much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all
those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less
citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in
less authors willing to pay a high publication fee.
For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more
than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right
incentives for those publishers.
hbplawinski wrote 1 day ago:
I doubt that this is true except maybe for the top journals. Mid
and low tier journals cater to scientists whose main incentive is
to publish no matter how while moderately optimizing for impact
factor (i.e. readers and citations). This lower quality market is
huge. The fact that even top tier publishers have created
low-ranking journals that address this market segment using
APC-based open-access models shows the alignment between
publisher and author interests will not necessarily lead to
increasing quality, rather the opposite.
nairboon wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
Does anyone actually read articles from those low tier
journals? Many of those articles are illegible fluff pieces.
That top tier publishers create new low-tier journals for this
market shows that they are very well aware of these incentives
and risks. They are not flooding their top journals with low
quality OA "pay to publish" articles, which was the argument
from OP.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
For academia's sake I hope you are correct, but my experience of
the system leads me to suspect otherwise, though only time will
tell.
One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the
publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami
slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus
on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the
fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
rovr138 wrote 1 day ago:
Is it a fee for publication or a fee for reviewing?
Found,
> Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your
eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and youâll
get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
specialp wrote 1 day ago:
It is on acceptance almost universally. This is why more
selective journals have higher APCs. The overhead of reviewing
and processing more papers when less ultimately convert costs
money.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
Upon publication almost exclusively.
woliveirajr wrote 1 day ago:
Didn't expect Brazil being off the "List of Countries Qualifying for
APC Waivers"
Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the
bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in
general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.
zipy124 wrote 1 day ago:
This is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given
in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there
is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices,
for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil,
for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40
in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for
instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary
for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK.
Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is
much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense
for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as
opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing
parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also.
Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer
countries than brazil.
[1]
HTML [1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/
coliveira wrote 1 day ago:
These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian
federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers
in public universities.
cs_throwaway wrote 1 day ago:
Surprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning
and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)
liampulles wrote 1 day ago:
Give me a reading list! What are great publications in the ACM that one
should read come January?
vbarrielle wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think old publications will become open access, only new
ones.
empressplay wrote 1 day ago:
No, there appears to be archives of past journals on the site.
Jtsummers wrote 1 day ago:
They made most of their archive open access a few years ago.
kragen wrote 1 day ago:
No, they did not. They made it free to download, but
open-accessâ licensing would permit third parties to legally
mirror it on servers that don't block access from Algeria or
Switzerland or privacy-focused browsers, and so far that
licensing hadn't happened. I'm happy to see that apparently it's
happening today.
______
â As defined in the Berlin Declaration 22 years ago:
HTML [1]: https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration
sundarurfriend wrote 1 day ago:
So that's what this wording means:
> Making the first 50 years of its publications and related
content freely available expresses ACMâs commitment to open
access publication and represents another milestone in our
transition to full open access within the next five years.
( from [1] )
I wouldn't have understood that nuance without the context
given by your comment, but in my developer mind I analogize
"freely available" to a "source available" license that they
took on, as a step towards going open access ("free and open
source") over time. I'm also happy to see that that transition
seems on track as planned.
HTML [1]: https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-y...
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Only up to 2000. Itâs unclear if the catalog from 2000 to 2025
will be fully made open. There may be legal obstacles if the
originating authors and institutions donât consent.
I havenât been able to find anything that states otherwise.
What changes in January is the policy for new publications.
justincormack wrote 1 day ago:
Everything is going to be open, they have been saying this for
ages. The issue isnt rights, they have those, its been funding
this.
justin66 wrote 1 day ago:
What's different legally about the publications prior to 2000?
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
I donât know, but they only opened the backfile up to 2000:
[1] Or at least they havenât explicitly announced anything
in that vein for post-2000.
HTML [1]: https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50...
SkyWolf wrote 1 day ago:
I get the Notice : "Your IP Address has been blocked", i am from
algeria by the way, not sure why my country is blocked.
brodo wrote 1 day ago:
They block agressively. Not only based on IP adresses. If you visit
the site with a privacy-focussed browser or in private mode they will
also tell you your IP is blocked.
thenthenthen wrote 1 day ago:
Thats weird. Fine from China (wonder what host they are using)
elashri wrote 1 day ago:
I think they probably have aggressive firewall with a lot of false
positives. I live in Switzerland and got blocked but tried a VPN to
US and it worked. Although it is usually that I get blocked for using
VPN.
But I'm not sure if it is about your IP or the whole country but I
guess it the former. Who knows what the firewall god at Cloudflare
does.
the-grump wrote 1 day ago:
Long overdue.
PaulHoule wrote 1 day ago:
Might make me join the ACM again!
guerby wrote 1 day ago:
Same for me, I sent emails about open access to the ACM circa 1995
when I was still a student. After a while I dropped my ACM
subscription.
It just took them 30 years :)
PaulHoule wrote 1 day ago:
For me it was that and their unqualified support of H-1B visas.
The ACM always said it wanted to build bridges with practitioners
but paywalled journals aren't the way to do it.
I would be 100% for more green cards or a better guestworker
program of some kind, but I've seen so many good people on H-1Bs
twisted into knots... Like the time the startup I was working for
hired a new HR head and two weeks in treated an H-1B so bad the HR
person quit. I wanted to tell this guy "your skills are in demand
and you could get a job across the street" but that's wasn't true.
I joined the IEEE Computer Society because it had a policy to not
have a policy which I could accept.
DIR <- back to front page