Open access to technical papers
Mar 12, 2011Moshe Vardi wrote an editoral about open access in the CACM in 2009. And others have followed up why it can’t, won’t or shouldn’t happen. I myself am skeptical that the organization can let go of the Digital Library cash cow; if even a quarter of the roughly 80,000 ACM members pay the additional $99US per year for access or take the professional membership I figure it would generate about $1.9M per year. Yet Usenix, an organization a magnitude smaller, manages to make its proceedings and papers available. This open access is good for the field.
Professor and cryptographer Matt Blaze weighs in at his blog with Copywrongs.