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Ask HN: Are ACM worth a membership?

9 points by morphir ↗ HN
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?

ref. http://www.acm.org/

12 comments

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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

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.

owinebarger
If you need more than a few ACM papers, it probably is.
morphir
aren't articles published under the domain of academia supposed to be free of charge?
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.
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.
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.

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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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.
gmosx
Most definitely, yes