You'll note, for example, that https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... bears no license of any kind, and the unfortunate fact is that under current copyright law is that random people redistributing copies of the paper is by default illegal.
Or rather a ";login:".
Does anyone want to form an ACM Cool Papers Club?
What's the license?
The Berlin Declaration that defined Open Access https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration defines it as follows:
> 1. Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
> 2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability [sic], and long-term archiving.
This page is all about #2. What's #1?
I'm delighted to be able to read and share the classic CACM articles that have shaped the history of informatics, thanks to the ACM's policy changes over the last few years. The other day, for example, I was reading Liskov's paper on CLU in which she introduces the abstract data type: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800233.807045
But, as far as I can tell, neither that web page nor the PDF linked from it has a license granting "a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose." So, if I post it on my personal web site, or upload it to WikiSource or the Internet Archive, I'm still at risk of copyright lawsuits. And until I can do that, I only have access to the paper as long as CloudFlare thinks I'm human.
That's the problem Open Access is designed to solve.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The ACM is probably never again going to publish a paper as influential as Liskov's paper I mentioned above, or Knuth's "Structured Programming With go to Statements", or "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362929.362947, or Schorre's "META-II: A Syntax-Oriented Compiler Writing Language" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800257.808896, or Ken Thompson's "Regular Expression Search Algorithm" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363347.363387, or Dan Ingalls on "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762.
Papers like those are the ones that we need to protect our ability to archive and distribute. Not David Geerts's "The Transformative Power of Inspiration" from the current issue of CACM https://cacm.acm.org/careers/the-transformative-power-of-ins.... (I am not making this up.) Thompson was competing with, let's say, Mooers and Schorre; Geerts has decided instead to compete with Jesus, the Buddha, and Norman Vincent Peale, and my brief reading of the article does not offer much hope for his prospects.
It seems safe to say that in 30 or 100 years' time nobody will cite Geerts's article as a turning point in the human understanding of inspiration, so if it's lost due to copyright restrictions, it probably won't matter that much.
At the other extreme, scholars seeking to understand the historical origins of object-orientation or personal computers would be crippled without access to material like Ingalls's paper. I'm not speculating—I'm speaking from experience, because lacking that access, I grew up thinking C++ was object-oriented!
But what do we see on the current version of the Ingalls paper that the ACM's web server just gave me? A note added in 02002 prohibiting public archival and redistribution:
> Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work or personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
What does this mean? The 800,000 previously published articles will stay paywalled and only the new stuff will be open? Or will stuff be open to individuals while institutions have to keep paying? Or what?
Though I'm not a fan of charging exorbitant open access fees. Arxiv charges exactly how much?
Still waiting for IEEE though.
