

Ask HN: Are ACM worth a membership? - morphir

I see acm offer a lot of Computer Science articles located in one page. To access a download-link, I have to sign up for a membership, so the question is, are they worth the effort and money?<p>ref. http://www.acm.org/
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portman
I renew my membership each year mostly to support the Turing Award.

The journals (both online and print) are nice bonuses, but the satisfaction of
supporting our field's Nobel Prize is well worth the nominal $99/year
membership fee.

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jacquesm
It's $99 per year and $50 for students. I've been on the fence for a long
time, on the one hand there are tons of interesting papers to read, on the
other I try to be a member of as little things as possible.

Also, plenty of the content that is available on the ACM portal site is
available elsewhere, usually pre-prints on the authors websites.

Personally I think all research that is somehow subsidized ought to be
accessible to the general public without payment.

edit: make that 2x$99, once for the membership and once for access to their
digital content.

<http://www.acm.org/membership/dues>

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eugenejen
The academic granting system is kind of complex now. But this is not the issue
with ACM's position as the 'publisher' with copyright ownership to 'academic
researchers' paper.

I think there is need for AAAI, ACM, IEEE, SIAM, American Physics Society to
open up their vast digital libraries to general public via internet, at the
same time a business model for those organizations to be repository
maintainers for the papers in the long run. (I think we need such organization
to exists because all authors of academic papers eventually will leave
academic due to death, retirement, working for industry that won't publish).
So far I think no one has a good solution yet.

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spooky
Beside the academic papers, access to the Skillsoft courses and Books 24x7 are
well worth the price of the basic ACM membership. I've found the free ACM
journal often has useful content as well.

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thyrsus
It's worth it to me because they present a respected and sane point of view
concerning computing to the U.S. congress. CACM makes me aware of the larger
context. The Safari subscription you get includes much, but not all, of
O'Reilly's catalog, in addition to a lot of other titles related to computing
and the business thereof.

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andrewf
If you're near a large library that allows public access, they may have
subscriptions that allow access to journal articles on their computers.

I'm an ACM member, but for any other papers I just walk into the university I
live near with a USB key.

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starkfist
No.

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owinebarger
If you need more than a few ACM papers, it probably is.

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morphir
aren't articles published under the domain of academia supposed to be free of
charge?

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owinebarger
It would certainly be nice for work supported by public funds, but that isn't
the way it is now. I'm assuming the OP needs the information in the journals
now or in the near future, so he has to operate under current conditions.

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gmosx
Most definitely, yes

