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The ACM Digital Library Is Now Open Access During Coronavirus Pandemic (acm.org) 32

Posted by BeauHD from the come-and-get-it dept.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has made the ACM Digital Library open access to help support the computing community during the coronavirus pandemic. Founded in 1947, the ACM is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society and publishes over 50 journals, including the prestigious Journal of the ACM, and two general magazines for computer professionals, Communications of the ACM and Queue.

"We believe that ACM can help support research, discovery and learning during this time of crisis by opening the ACM Digital Library to all," writes ACM President Cherri Pancake in a letter on ACM.org. "For the next three months, there will be no fees assessed for accessing or downloading work published by ACM. We hope this will help researchers, practitioners and students maintain access to our publications as well as increasing visibility and awareness of ACM's journals, proceedings and magazines."

The ACM DL will continue to be open through June 30, 2020. "This global health crisis is a unique challenge that has impacted many ACM members," adds Pancake. "We would like to express our concern and support for all who are affected by this outbreak."
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The ACM Digital Library Is Now Open Access During Coronavirus Pandemic

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  • It would be great if this stayed open for good. There must be some other business model that would support the ACM without having to lock their knowledge up.

    • It would be great if this stayed open for good. There must be some other business model that would support the ACM without having to lock their knowledge up.

      Couldn't agree more. Putting scientific research behind a paywall doesn't help research very much. Is it too much to dream of Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic Search showing all abstracts and full-text PDFs for all research?

  • ACM President Cherri Pancake? (Score:3)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @03:07AM (#59891594)
    My April Fools response is getting triggered

    • My organization, which convenes in July if Kansas City still exists by then, has a Pancake in its leadership. I'm getting my oxcart ready for the trip now.

  • Quick Pull an Arron Swartz. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Somebody build a scraper and download them all while they are free.

  • I subscribed to the ACM all too many years ago and was singularly unimpressed with their financial model. The journal itself was over priced for its value and if you actually wanted anything useful you had to fork over more $$$ to get access to their library. Additionally everything was subdivided into SIGs (special interest groups) and of course, each SIG had its own subscription fee.

    I wouldn't be surprised if this is an attempt by the ACM to say "please pay attention to us! We're still relevant in the int

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I wouldn't be surprised if this is an attempt by the ACM to say "please pay attention to us! We're still relevant in the internet age".

      Not likely - the ACM is big enough that you know about it if you're involved in the academic research side of computing. And you definitely know of their various SIGs like SIGGRAPH that happens every year or so demonstrating the latest in computer generated graphics.

      The problem I see is well, every university is closed right now, so less research is being done. Opening up th

  • So, what are the gems in this library? (Score:3)

    by Koen Lefever ( 2543028 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @05:54AM (#59891846)
    Anybody has reading suggestions to share?

    • Re:So, what are the gems in this library? (Score:4, Informative)

      by WDot ( 1286728 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @06:33AM (#59891924)
      The ACM Digital Library is probably most valuable for its academic computer science papers. It's hard to recommend something off the cuff based on that, but if you work in a computing industry it might be worth it to see what new ideas researchers have been proposing. You can look through their Special Interest Groups to see if there's a match: https://dl.acm.org/sigs [acm.org]. Even software engineering https://dl.acm.org/sig/sigsoft [acm.org] and IT https://dl.acm.org/sig/sigmis [acm.org] , which seem like more "practical" and "mundane" fields have researchers developing experimental technologies or performing interesting scientific studies.

    • I find it fun to look up the papers that my colleagues and/or college professors have published. It's especially fun to read some of those really old ones, too.

      One time my boss was telling me about how when he was in high school he got to work with a professor on a research project as a (very junior) participant. I was able to find the paper that resulted from that project in the ACM DL and printed it out for him.

  • Apple's Book store, and Amazon's book store, are all open, and you can download as much as you like - and the authors get paid for it. By you. And then there is LibriVox with 15,000 or so books available for free (all out of copyright).
  • I'm excited to have access to this high-quality information. I feel pretty fortunate that this particular database is now accessible.

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