Every ACM paper can be found for free either on Arxiv, the author's webpage, or in very rare cases SciHub. People pay for ACM membership because they want to, not because they are forced to. It's a great organization to be a part of. You can even participate in ACM conferences without being a member!
Making it open access makes perfect sense and can only increase scientific engagement and distribution.
Every recent and/or popular and/or lucky paper can be found "for free" easily. With complete access, CACM ceases to be a blind spot of scientific literature.
> People pay for ACM membership because they want to, not because they are forced to.
I used to pay for membership because I enjoyed perusing the print edition of CACM. I loved the opportunities for serenditipy that it created merely by being on my coffee table. The digital edition doesn't have that. It requires conscious effort to go check out the website.
(I write occasional blog posts for CACM and am also on the editorial board)
If you have ideas for how to improve CACM, the editor-in-chief (Jim Larus) is highly receptive. He's interested in increasing the value of CACM for industry professionals, researchers, and students, and in increasing membership in ACM.
For example, one idea I've shared with him is to make CACM the main gateway for all of ACM content. You'll note that the new CACM has an "Explore Topics" menu at the top, which lists areas like Architecture, HCI, Security and Privacy. My suggestion was to make this a feed for all relevant ACM content, including SIG newsletters that ACM already publishes, paper award winners, recent journal articles, blog posts, etc.
Perhaps it might be useful to get feedback by asking some questions. If you are a member of ACM, what do you find most valuable about it? And if you aren't a member, given that you're on HN and likely interested in a lot of content and conferences that ACM offers, why not? What could ACM do differently or what could it offer that would make membership valuable to you?
Only new ones. ACM’s paper archives are still useful for looking into the past. Often if the paper isn’t that popular, they are the only source. However, this announcement is just about the CACM, still useful, but it isn’t opening up the archive.
They are, though. This announcement is about CACM becoming fully open access, but it's also a bit of a "progress report" on opening up the archive.
>> By the end of 2023, approximately 40% of the ~26,000 articles ACM publishes annually were being published Open Access utilizing the ACM Open model. As ACM has progressed toward this goal, it has increasingly opened large parts of the ACM Digital Library, including more than 100,000 articles published between 1951–2000. It is ACM’s plan to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when the transition to full Open Access is complete.
I thought they weren’t opening it up until 2026? Anything published now worth reading is open access, or can easily be retrieved by googling from somewhere else, so that isn’t much of a concern.
Making it open access makes perfect sense and can only increase scientific engagement and distribution.