

Springer's CS Reading Room (Free access to CS journals) - clyfe
http://www.springer.com/computer/reading+room+welcome

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_delirium
Hmm, this is an interesting experiment, though clearly positioned as more of a
"free trial sample" than "open access" kind of thing. They're making a bunch
of stuff free (w/ login), but they rotate which stuff it is every three
months, presumably in hopes that by then you'll have gotten hooked on
something and demand that your library subscribe to it.

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alextp
For most research purposes this is awful, though. Usually one's a lot more
interested in this or that specific paper than in a random journal edition, as
it is well known that both (1) academic journals end up having a low signal-
to-noise ratio and (2) compounding that, most academic knowledge is very
specific, so most of what's around will feel like uninteresting tripe to all
but the most easily excitable reader (and I say this as a wannabe cs
academic).

It's easy to forget how I am that machine learning and natural language
processing have seemed to neatly avoid most closed-access traps (ACM, IEEE,
Springer, Elsevier) and instead rely on open conferences and journals (and the
closed-access Computational Linguistics journal is very often full of expanded
versions of good ACL papers), and at the same time most researchers do realize
that more people reading their work means more influence.

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tomjen3
Excellent market segmentation though: this is useless for academics, who
normally subscribe to these journals, so they will continue to pay through the
nose but it could be very useful for the theoretically oriented computer
programmer who likes to check up on what is new in his field, but who isn't
likely to subscribe to these journals, unless you can get him hocked.

The fact that they sell other peoples work, paid for by government and other
public founds, is just even more brilliant.

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showerst
It's a tiny detail on an otherwise cool site, but the 10 character maximum on
the password when you create an account is really annoying.

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geekdesigngirl
It's not just the 10 character limit but also they disallow special characters
(i.e. no exclamation mark). When I developed my web app, I had a wise
programmer tell me to allow up to 32 characters with special characters. I
don't like being limited to what my password can be. My bank's website is
horrible at that.

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smanek
Yeah, Amex's site only lets you use 8 characters (and it's case insensitive!).

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jarin
When I saw CS Reading Room, I immediately thought "Christian Science Reading
Room". Glad I actually clicked the link :)

