Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

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From the website you linked:

>Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work can choose ACM's author-pays option, which allows for perpetual open access through the ACM Digital Library

So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ?

>And the copyright block in one of my papers as an example: https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf which says "© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM." (there are no fees to choosing this option, by the way)

This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide. Whether you satisfy the personal and classroom requirement is not clear. It is also not clear what agreement you signed with ACM. And you certainly cannot publish this under a different license because

>Please note that the right to assign a CC-BY license to the published Version of Record of the Work requires either the payment of an APC or an affiliation with an institution that participates in the ACM Open program

>Including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf

And this is the crux of the issue. Nobody is compensated for this in the review cycle. So why is the cost of the final product so astronomical ?

>Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service.

I don't get this argument. AirBnB has a different product. That's why I mentioned the cost of AWS S3 and R2, which is literally what you would pay to host things.

> So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ?

Tangential, though at a recent SIGPLAN conference, the cost to authors to licence under CC-BY was listed at 400USD. In place was "The article processing charge (APC) is to be paid anyway for all PACMPL articles, and ACM SIGPLAN covers it if you cannot afford it. Your paper will be open access no matter which kind of publishing-rights agreement you choose.".

That said, from what I can tell, most of the main programming languages conferences have far better systems and communities in place than many other fields (a lot of open access, double blind reviews, etc.).

At the very least, I hope that all the top conferences (e.g., the ones in http://csrankings.org/) become open access by default at no additional cost to authors. There are a lot of strange discrepancies even between sister conferences. For example, VLDB is open access, but SIGMOD isn't. It's all the same people in both conferences.

> This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide

The "Post" section of the page linked by lazyjeff says:

>Otherwise known as "Self-Archiving" or "Posting Rights", all ACM published authors of magazine articles, journal articles, and conference papers retain the right to post the pre-submitted (also known as "pre-prints"), submitted, accepted, and peer-reviewed versions of their work in any and all of the following sites:

> Author's Homepage

> ...

So posting a PDF of the "accepted version" to a personal website is not a "grey area" - it is explicitly permitted by the ACM.

This is the usual situation: authors retain the rights to put the "accepted" version on their homepage. This includes all the changes made in response to reviewer comments, but is formatted by the author rather than the publisher.

Unless they have selected an open-access option (which usually requires paying a fee), they typically do not have the rights to post the "publisher formatted" version. However, in fields like CS the submitted version is usually produced using a LaTeX template for the journal so looks very similar to the publisher-formatted version; the main differences are often things like the journal name and page numbers written in the headers and footers.

For lazyjeff's example, you can compare the version on his homepage [1] with the version on the ACM DL [2], and see that they look quite similar, but one obvious difference is the formatting of the last page: in the author-formatted version, the left column fills the full height of the page, and the right column is shorter; in the published version the left column is shortened so that both columns are the same height.

[1]: https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf

[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411764.3445100

I maintain that this is a grey area that has not been tested in courts, mainly because ACM would not pursue something like this. In a copyright lawsuit, it is not obvious to me that a judge would agree with your conclusion that slight differences in formatting make it "not the published version". INAL, but to me, the mention of ACM on the paper is itself problematic from a copyright standpoint.

Of course, the larger point I'm making in all this is that this is completely unnecessary and regressive.

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