Dr. Casey FieslerAcademics, I beg you. Please put copies of your published papers on your website, arxiv, whatever. Not only because it's great for the broader world beyond academia (who can't get behind paywalls at all) but it just took me 15 minutes to try to figure out how to log in to some particular database to get a copy of a paper. I don't even like the 3 minutes it takes to log into the ACM DL versus copying a title into google. Follow copyright rules but you can almost always post SOMETHING somewhere.
Alex McLean@cfiesler I think this is the wrong approach really - academics should just publish gold/diamond open access in the first place. Increasingly funders mandate it, and it's better for everyone. Personal websites go down and can be hard to find, preprint servers generally have terrible metadata. making papers available long term is the actual job of the publishers (sometimes their only job!). If they're not fulfilling that basic job, why not publish elsewhere?
@yaxu ACM charges for open access right now, and it’s not reasonable to suggest get CS academics should not publish there. But ACM allows you to post the final paper on your own website.
@cfiesler I think it's a reasonable suggestion. It's a ridiculous state of affairs that ACM conferences are so expensive while making it so difficult to read the papers. It's up to researchers to organise and change this.
@yaxu ACM has stated that they will be entirely open access by 2025.
But also I appreciate their copyright terms; it's way more reasonable than most journals. It's unusual to be explicitly allowed to post papers elsewhere.
And I don't really want to argue about how reasonable it is to expect junior academics to take a principled stand and not publish at the venues expected of them to get tenure in the meantime, but that's my position.
@cfiesler Ah that's good! and yes this is an issue that should be solved collectively rather than by blaming individuals.