More Walled Gardens to Tear Down: Technical Libraries
by DanIf ever there was an organization behind the times in its philosophy, it is the Association of Computing Machines. The ACM has has a stranglehold on technical papers for years, preventing anyone outside of their organization access to these documents without payment. This even though the ACM hasn’t written or reviewed these documents — the authors and reviewers have done all that work for free. And the thanks they get? Their work doesn’t make it out to the general public; it’s trapped behind a walled garden, where typically only those in academia will ever see or use it because their universities have an account.
ASIS&T’s Digital Library is no better. Again, you get abstracts for free, but a single paper will cost you $25 — for only 24 hours of use! Seriously? For work that hasn’t cost ASIS&T a penny. It’s highway robbery.
And to make matters worse, these organizations will gladly charge you to come to their conferences to hear people present their papers and thus make more money off the work of others. Hell, you have to pay to present your own work! It’s a racket, and I’m not sure why scientists and academics stand for it. Isn’t the point of academic work the free and liberal exchange of ideas? I’d love to look at the latest academic research when working on projects, and I wouldn’t even mind paying for it if I knew the money was going to the authors, not to parasitic organizations whose sole purpose is to guard and charge for information, not share it.
Mr., umm, Someone, tear down these walls!
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August 31st, 2007 at 3:21 am
Good post!
I’ve been arguing this since beginning my PhD. It’s the same for journals, conferences, workshops and the rest.
Can you imagine any other field where the following happens.
* You work hard to produce a piece of work.
* You pay someone else for the privilege of taking away all your rights to that work, to the point where you can no longer give it to anyone else.
* Your work is accepted or rejected based on reviews which are provided for free by your peers.
* You pay yet again to attend an event where you can present and defend your work.
* From that point on your work is now lost, locked behind a digital fortress (and an ugly website).
It’s a total joke and the publishers are rolling around in their offices, lighting cigars off $100 notes wondering when some authoritative figure is going to stand up and call Bullshit.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:58 am
I’m a bit surprised the HCI/IxD/IA community hasn’t created something analagous to the Public Library of Science (at least as far as I know). We certainly have the expertise to do it, it’s just a matter of focusing effort on it. I do think we could bring a unique perspective to the problem, not just reheating the traditional publication model with open access.
Of course, this wouldn’t really help unlock the historical research, but at least it could prevent new research from being held captive. This is a problem that is plaguing all areas of research, and is really stifling innovation. Only large university libraries can afford to pay the licensing fees, which are (exponentially increasingly) ridiculous since the publisher’s costs are minimal. It’s even more ridiculous that we have to pay anyway, since much of the research is publicly funded, so we’re really paying twice.
August 31st, 2007 at 12:43 pm
You mean something like arXiv?
arXiv started in the physics community in relation to the exact problem that you’re talking about, and then was expanded to other fields such as math and computer science. It has always existed online-only, and has always been hosted by a government or academic sponsor. (Originally Los Alamos National Laboratory, now Cornell University.)
arXiv does contain a Human-Computer Interaction category under Computer Science, along with some relevant content in other subcategories such as Information Retrieval.
August 31st, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Amen. The user experiences offered by the digital libraries of both organizations are so unrelentingly bad that I avoid them as much as possible.
In fact, I generally use secondary sources like Connotea to find things in the ACM and ASIST libraries…
Go social discovery mechanisms!
September 4th, 2007 at 10:04 am
The problem isn’t the Associations themselves, but the whole academic publishing model. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not supporting the publishers. It’s highway robbery what they do and many of them are evil. Having worked in scientific libraries where we had to subscribe to these journals, it’s just mind blowing what is charged.
But folks don’t get little things like, oh, say TENURE, unless they publish in these types of journals. The publishers charge the associations an arm and a leg to publish their papers, so the costs just flow right down. It’s a messed up model, but it’s going to take A LOT to fix it.
However, you can walk right into any public university and get access to these for free. Sometimes if your city is big enough you can get them at a public library too. Yes, that means having to leave the comfort of the couch, but if it’s to visit a library, perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. Who knows what else you’ll find there?
September 10th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Your community library can probably help you here: many libraries have subscriptions to ACM, IEEE and many other academic research publications. I used my local library’s online access heavily, getting PDFs of the articles I was interested in. Free of charge and from home, exactly what I want. Sadly, library funding was cut here this year so no more library, period.
I agree fully with the complaint - it’s one of the reasons I’m no longer a member of ACM or IEEE. They don’t do that much for the community, so much as for themselves via their paid member base.
September 10th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I so agree. But what’s worse is when I hear criticisms of the UX/IA/whatever fields about how we are reinventing the wheel and condescending ‘don’t you know, we solved that problem years ago’. Aaarrrrgggghhh - it is impossible to know what’s been done if it is locked away.
I joined the ACM for a year just to get access to papers, but stopped as it is a ridiculous amount of money for a tiny freelance business.
I’ll give ASIS&T one plug though - all papers from the IA Summit are available (if the author provided them) with no restrictions. They are a little hard to dig out at the moment, but plans are afoot to do something about that…
September 12th, 2007 at 5:56 am
[...] just read an interesting article at the AdaptivePath homepage. The comment is about technical libraries, for example the Association [...]
September 17th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
I’m shocked. Is this 2007?
September 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am
dan, I think you’ve missed the mark by shooting at ACM. Blogged here: http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/09/20/tear_down_the_digital_science_publishing_walls.php
January 19th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I agree with DrWex, the authors should publish a copy themselves, you even published your own Masters Thesis Dan, so it looks like you agree? And your site/BLOG is a complete reference library. Freedom of information is an academic given, so academics should take personal responsibility for the dissemination of their own research, if you don’t know how, learn, it’s very easy?