TITLE: "Costs $20" is Functionally Indistinguishable from Gone AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: December 11, 2013 12:01 PM DESC: ----- BODY: In his write-up on the origin of zero-based indexing in computing, Mike Hoye comments on the difficulties he had tracking down original sources:
Part of the problem is access to the historical record, of course. I was in favor of Open Access publication before, but writing this up has cemented it: if you're on the outside edge of academia, $20/paper for any research that doesn't have a business case and a deep-pocketed backer is completely untenable, and speculative or historic research that might require reading dozens of papers to shed some light on longstanding questions is basically impossible. There might have been a time when this was OK and everyone who had access to or cared about computers was already an IEEE/ACM member, but right now the IEEE -- both as a knowledge repository and a social network -- is a single point of a lot of silent failure. "$20 for a forty-year-old research paper" is functionally indistinguishable from "gone", and I'm reduced to emailing retirees to ask them what they remember from a lifetime ago because I can't afford to read the source material.
I'm an academic. When I am on campus, I have access to the ACM Digital Library. When I go home, I do not. I could pay for a personal subscription, but that seems an unnecessary expense when I am on campus so much. I never have access to IEEE Xplore, Hoy's "single point of silent failure". Our university library chose to drop its institutional subscription a few years ago, and for good reason: it is ridiculously expensive, especially relative to the value we receive from it university-wide. (We don't have an engineering college.) We inquired about sharing a subscription with our sister schools, as we are legally under a single umbrella, but at least at that time, IEEE didn't allow such sharing. What about non-academics, such as Hoye? We are blessed in computing with innumerable practitioners who study our history, write about, and create new ideas. Some are in industry and may have access to these resources, or an expense account. Many others, though, work on their own as independent contractors and researchers. They need access to materials, and $20 a pop is an acceptable expense. Their loss if our loss. If Hoye had not written his article on the history of zero-based indexing, most of us wouldn't know the full story. As time goes by, I hope that open access to research publications continues to grow. We really shouldn't have to badger retired computer scientists with email asking what they remember now about a topic they wrote an authoritative paper on forty years ago. -----