As a researcher with many articles in the ACM library, I have to say this is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Obviously, lawyers can decipher the terms of ACM publishing contracts and Creative Commons licences to determine if this will be acceptable or not. But ACM is not a company, it's a non-profit founded in 1947 to represent scientists.
I would be surprised if a majority of ACM members were to say yes should we ask them (but ACM is not known for such democracy). Along with book authors, we are one of the many people that provide the knowledge and expertise on which large tech firms train their models, and get nothing in return. Actually, life is getting worse for us: extra workload in universities with students' AI use, a completely broken peer review system, etc. Hence the irony of ACM thinking about licensing, and only licensing, at a time where this is a least of our priorities.
It seems that the "open access" is more marketing than something reality based they actually want to do.
https://dl.acm.org/openaccess ---> So how to access the content? Do I have to register or what? It the "open access" only for academic org's people or for everyone in the world?
https://dl.acm.org/ ---> Okay, nice simple search field without loggin in, but when you try to search something, you get thousands of results, even if you search specific author and the exact name of paper, you will get hundreds of results and the thing you want is buried somewhere on page 247. Filters of authors, years etc. are for Premium subscription. But just googling the thing finds the link to ACM... And want to get the actual PDF? Hope it says "free access"...
riedel 17 minutes ago [-]
Nobody uses their search anyways.
Google scholar has become the way to search papers (which is somewhat worrisome). What people want from there is a download for all the stuff that does not list an author copy. Open access IMHO is just a reaction to the fact that mostly you would not need a subscription anyhow. Now the authors are paying upfront or universities are paying flat for all their researchers. The problem is now the incentives are not increasing the number of subscriptions but increasing the number of papers published.
hmokiguess 56 minutes ago [-]
So will LLMs have premium-tier access or basic-tier access?
dominotw 42 minutes ago [-]
it is open like open in openai
juancn 3 hours ago [-]
They probably already scraped it.
pohl 23 minutes ago [-]
No doubt
bezko 54 minutes ago [-]
Something something Roko's basilisk
croes 2 hours ago [-]
Are they in the position to do that?
What about the authors?
dsr_ 28 minutes ago [-]
The ACM sent around a nice query to members which made it clear that they were going to do it even if 100% of the members said "No, don't do that".
I suppose they could be sued.
em3rgent0rdr 27 minutes ago [-]
Don't you grant ACM a right to distribute your work when publishing? So doesn't ACM already have the right to grant access to AI?
brcmthrowaway 38 minutes ago [-]
It's already in there
hmokiguess 57 minutes ago [-]
Now? That's cute.
skywhopper 3 hours ago [-]
TLDR: “we’re going to try to get money from LLM providers for access to our back catalog without getting permission from the authors or providing them with any share of the revenue”.
anticensor 2 hours ago [-]
Scholarly article authors never expected royalty or permission for their scholarly works to be reused.
30129875 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hbnfg 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
skippyfish 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Diogenesian 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is AI-generated. It is focused and direct. It reads like anodyne albeit totally human academic manager writing.
recursivedoubts 3 hours ago [-]
the digital library should have always been open access
now it will be fodder for the slop machine
(i think that LLMs are going to wreck the peer review system for all but hard-experimental papers)
jerf 1 hours ago [-]
Since starting to use AIs seriously for search in the last 3 months I have read and referenced more published papers and academic primary sources then I think I did in the previous 5 years. They're fantastic for pointing at some claim and asking for the primary source for it, and then it does the work of following things through the layers of backref to the original, assuming it's online. Opening the library up to AI access makes it far more accessible and usable then it was before.
AIs, at least in their current form, make you more who ever you were. If you want snap, glib answers of dubious accuracy, they'll give them to you, more easily than ever before. If you want to dig back into primary sources and get the original content, they'll do that for you, more easily than ever before.
Can't speak to how the science infrastructure is going to handle them, but if it takes down the peer review system, which I think has been worthless for probably going on two decades and has just given the entire enterprise a false sense of assurance, it'll probably be a net gain in the end. Peer review is a source of more problems then it is solving right now.
ilaksh 3 hours ago [-]
The real efficacy of the peer review system has always been somewhat questionable. That's a big reason why arxiv is so prominent.
jmount 3 hours ago [-]
Came to say the same thing. Now remains the time to give the public access to the ACM digital library.
It got a lot of discussion here when it happened and before as they phased it in.
dan_gee 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ilaksh 3 hours ago [-]
I don't want to be mean but if it's that hard to even recognize that LLMs are even a valid thing that could intersect with your business that you need some kind of campaign for it..
It's almost like, "don't hurt yourself unc, we will just search arxiv".
Rendered at 19:55:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I would be surprised if a majority of ACM members were to say yes should we ask them (but ACM is not known for such democracy). Along with book authors, we are one of the many people that provide the knowledge and expertise on which large tech firms train their models, and get nothing in return. Actually, life is getting worse for us: extra workload in universities with students' AI use, a completely broken peer review system, etc. Hence the irony of ACM thinking about licensing, and only licensing, at a time where this is a least of our priorities.
https://dl.acm.org/openaccess ---> So how to access the content? Do I have to register or what? It the "open access" only for academic org's people or for everyone in the world?
https://dl.acm.org/ ---> Okay, nice simple search field without loggin in, but when you try to search something, you get thousands of results, even if you search specific author and the exact name of paper, you will get hundreds of results and the thing you want is buried somewhere on page 247. Filters of authors, years etc. are for Premium subscription. But just googling the thing finds the link to ACM... And want to get the actual PDF? Hope it says "free access"...
Google scholar has become the way to search papers (which is somewhat worrisome). What people want from there is a download for all the stuff that does not list an author copy. Open access IMHO is just a reaction to the fact that mostly you would not need a subscription anyhow. Now the authors are paying upfront or universities are paying flat for all their researchers. The problem is now the incentives are not increasing the number of subscriptions but increasing the number of papers published.
What about the authors?
I suppose they could be sued.
now it will be fodder for the slop machine
(i think that LLMs are going to wreck the peer review system for all but hard-experimental papers)
AIs, at least in their current form, make you more who ever you were. If you want snap, glib answers of dubious accuracy, they'll give them to you, more easily than ever before. If you want to dig back into primary sources and get the original content, they'll do that for you, more easily than ever before.
Can't speak to how the science infrastructure is going to handle them, but if it takes down the peer review system, which I think has been worthless for probably going on two decades and has just given the entire enterprise a false sense of assurance, it'll probably be a net gain in the end. Peer review is a source of more problems then it is solving right now.
> Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991
It's almost like, "don't hurt yourself unc, we will just search arxiv".