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... so let's do something about it.
Feb. 17th, 2013 11:45 pmI've been hammering on this idea that we should fix the ACM for a while now.
So in an effort to do something about it, I launched a petition/protest site! You can sign it to push the Association for Computing Machinery to make CS research papers available to the public -- please sign and share broadly, so we can build momentum and make this a thing!
teardownthispaywall.appspot.com
Clearly, publishing models are not the world's biggest problem. There are all kinds of worse problems in the world, and even many more worse social problems within computing.
But I want to fix this, for a number of reasons. I think it's winnable in the near term. I think we should make the major professional society for CS into something that we can be proud of. The field that invented the Internet, and the professional society currently headed by the guy who invented the Internet should make use of the Internet to get knowledge to everybody, with the lowest possible barrier to entry. Because great new ideas often come from unexpected people and unexpected collaborations.
And making it even a little bit harder to get a paper excludes people. There's a huge difference between "ohh, they're not that expensive, and anyway you can find most of them on the authors' websites" and THEY ARE PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE IN A CENTRAL LOCATION ON THE WEB PLEASE READ ANY AND ALL OF THEM THAT YOU FIND INTERESTING. ALSO DO TEXT MINING.
And don't you want people to read your paper? Isn't your work important? If it's not, why are you doing it?
So in an effort to do something about it, I launched a petition/protest site! You can sign it to push the Association for Computing Machinery to make CS research papers available to the public -- please sign and share broadly, so we can build momentum and make this a thing!
teardownthispaywall.appspot.com
Clearly, publishing models are not the world's biggest problem. There are all kinds of worse problems in the world, and even many more worse social problems within computing.
But I want to fix this, for a number of reasons. I think it's winnable in the near term. I think we should make the major professional society for CS into something that we can be proud of. The field that invented the Internet, and the professional society currently headed by the guy who invented the Internet should make use of the Internet to get knowledge to everybody, with the lowest possible barrier to entry. Because great new ideas often come from unexpected people and unexpected collaborations.
And making it even a little bit harder to get a paper excludes people. There's a huge difference between "ohh, they're not that expensive, and anyway you can find most of them on the authors' websites" and THEY ARE PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE IN A CENTRAL LOCATION ON THE WEB PLEASE READ ANY AND ALL OF THEM THAT YOU FIND INTERESTING. ALSO DO TEXT MINING.
And don't you want people to read your paper? Isn't your work important? If it's not, why are you doing it?
