... so let's do something about it.
Feb. 17th, 2013 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexr_rwxI'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?
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no subject
Date: 2013-02-18 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 12:49 am (UTC)I definitely want people to be able to pick "none of the above" and just sign to voice their support, but maybe folks are just skimming over the form too fast.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 02:04 am (UTC)Pullrequested. :-)
I added local validation of the name and email boxes, because it seemed unnecessarily punitive either 1) to lose them by refreshing the page when asking about the checkboxes, or 2) to ask about the checkboxes first and then reject you for not giving an email address.
I left in the server-side validation too because I didn't want to mess with it, and it would be nontrivial for me to test changes to the non-javascript parts of the code.
Please check my work carefully before deploying it to the world. :-)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 05:11 am (UTC)But the other parts of your change are live on the site! Thank you! :D
no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 05:23 am (UTC)(I was assuming that, for so many people to check none, they must have missed them; I now suspect instead they just didn't feel that the items applied to them. I went ahead and checked all three, but I can assure you I will never actually be asked to review anything for the ACM.)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 01:35 am (UTC)I imagine everybody who cares about OA but would publish (because for people in most CS subdisciplines, you're stuck with the ACM for now!) feels about like that! You can declare it publicly somewhere! :D