Computing Education and the ACM Paywall

Recently Mark Guzdial wrote a blog post in which he describes some of the particularities of research in computing education, and defends the continued paywalling of ACM articles in the Digital Library. Just to be clear, Mark is brilliant and friendly, and he does fantastic work. But I think he's mistaken on this particular issue.

Here is Mark's argument, to reduce it to bullet points:

• CS Ed research is typically not funded by public funding agencies, but done on researchers' own time, so the argument that it should belong to the public does not hold.
• Educators working in the developing world have different needs than those in the WEIRD world; we can't simply toss papers over the wall and let them figure it out.
• ... and anyway, the ACM is basically good people, and doing good work with the money it collects, especially for the education community.
• Ergo, the ACM should keep up its paywall.

Early in his post, Mark brings up the first sentence from the Tear Down This Paywall petition: "Computer science research is largely funded by the public, for the public good." He points out that lots of CS Ed research isn't supported by grants, and that people who are primarily educators do it on their own time, because it is important to them.

So firstly, Mark's own work is funded by the NSF (as he mentions), so the argument about funding would apply to his work, along with the bulk of CS research broadly. But even if we accept that the public can't demand access to the other CS Ed papers, we should consider: what's best for the careers and goals of the CS Ed researchers themselves?  What do they want?

Certainly CS Ed researchers trying to publicize their work -- people who care so much about it that they take it on as a labor of love -- would prefer to reach the broadest possible audience. They don't directly benefit from a paywall. They may like the ACM and want it to continue putting on events, but the paywall keeps them from readers.

But Mark takes a bizarre turn in framing the idea of dismantling the DL's paywall as forcing open access on unsuspecting researchers who didn't agree to it, "after the fact". OA wasn't part of the deal!  He says in the comments, "Certainly, volunteers can volunteer the fruits of their labors. They shouldn't be coerced.  It shouldn't be a requirement." It's hard to imagine a young researcher protesting a larger audience. People don't choose to publish with the ACM because of the paywall on the DL, but in spite of it. For many subfields, ACM conferences are simply where one must publish to be taken seriously, and dealing with the paywall is the cost of doing business.

As for the second point, about researchers and educators in the developing world -- while it is almost certainly not sufficient to release our papers if our goal is to help them develop their own curricula, it's verging on paternalistic to decide ahead of time what would and would not be helpful for them. Make the papers broadly available and let them decide what is relevant and useful. And by all means, we should develop other materials too, but this is a separate pursuit.

We find educators, working programmers, interested laypeople, and researchers from other disciplines in a similar boat -- they may not have the context to completely understand a paper intended for specialists, but they can still get something out of it. And to collaborate meaningfully with -- or join -- the specialist community, they're going to have to read lots of papers. We should reduce the barriers to entry for potentially-interested people, wherever they are. Working programmers and educators are empirically short on both time and ACM memberships.

So for most computing research, we are still seeing publicly funded work made harder to access than it should be. And for CS Ed research, we see work that researchers might want widely distributed made less available than it could and should be. Opening the DL would be an immense good for people around the world -- it's great that Mark and others put in the additional effort to make their personal papers available, but not everyone is so conscientious, or so web-savvy, or so still alive. And the current state of affairs still requires that people go hunt down each paper individually.

It would be silly to claim that the ACM doesn't need a revenue stream, and I think their continued existence is probably a good thing. But there are other funding models for scholarly societies. The current state of affairs is comfortable for Mark and other established researchers, but it could be much better for the up-and-coming looking for a broad audience, as well as for interested parties outside of well-funded academic institutions.

ACM's optional Open Access is effectively a NOOP

Not all academics have the great moral luck to be working in NLP, where almost everything we publish is going to be Open Access whether we care about OA or not -- barring some out-of-the-way venues who really need to get their acts together.

For example, Lindsey Kuper (both my favorite programming languages researcher and my wife) just put in a paper at the Functional High-Performance Computing workshop at ICFP. And roughly five minutes after she got the acceptance notification, she got the form to sign over publishing rights to the ACM.

Now the ACM has recently made open-access publishing available through their Digital Library -- for $1100 to $1700, depending on the circumstances. I’m not opposed to APCs (“article processing charges”) as such; this seems like a step in the right direction. But I’ll argue that this particular approach is effectively a no-op.

It was unclear to Lindsey’s advisor whether they could pay the Open Access fee out of their grant money -- and while he’s a great, upstanding guy, he’s also a young pre-tenure professor, so he didn’t have a lot of spare time to look into this. He’s trying to do some science, not get bogged down in policy details. They went with the “retain copyright, but the DL copy won’t be OA“ option. I imagine this scenario will be pretty typical.

So this new policy effectively won’t change anything for the ACM’s Digital Library: all old papers are still locked down, and for most of the new ones, the authors won’t fork over the money for the OA option.

It’s a giant missed opportunity; the Digital Library could be a phenomenally useful resource. But for people without ACM membership or institutional access -- e.g., almost every working programmer -- the situation is the same as before. If you accidentally click on a link to the DL, that’s just a momentary dead end. Hopefully you can find the paper somewhere else.

ACM Publications Board: "How can we minimally budge so you'll stop bothering us about open access?"

You may have seen the recent article from CACM, Positioning ACM for an Open Access Future. I found the article fairly upsetting. The first paragraph...

The age of open access is upon us. Increasingly, the consensus of authors of research articles and their funding institutions is that the fruits of taxpayer-supported research should be freely available to the public. This is a compelling argument and a noble goal.

However, we're not going to do that anytime soon! They then launch into a red-herring discussion of predatory OA publishers (which are a real thing! there do exist vanity presses that have sprung up to capitalize on the OA trend) -- but this ignores how such publishers come about. You don't accidentally become such a vanity press. Serious venues with good review boards won't have the problem of "a glut of third-rate publications that add noise rather than insight to the scientific enterprise".

Afterwards, they discuss four different approaches for the ACM to not go fully OA: the first is that, optionally, authors could pay an extra fee to have their articles available from the Digital Library. The other three are simply ways in which the paywall restrictions could be lifted under some circumstances.

None of these are acceptable. Not if we believe that "the fruits of taxpayer-supported research should be freely available to the public". Why is the current situation even sort of OK?

The ACM's resistance to OA so far, its claims that figuring out a way to do it is too hard, that it's too expensive or will lead to bad publications -- as far as I can tell, these mean at least one of two things:

• Perhaps the ACM is not as clever as USENIX, the Association for Computational Linguistics, NIPS and The Journal of Machine Learning Research (ie, most of the machine learning community), and all of those math folks...
• Or alternatively, people within the ACM, despite its apparent status as a non-profit, really like all that money; they like it a lot more than the purported mission to foster "the open interchange of information..." 

Which one of these is true? Both?

We need to get the ACM to stop thinking like a for-profit publisher and start thinking like their goal is to move the field forward and educate people. The ACM needs to drop both the paywall and its membership in the AAP.

Either that, or we as computing professionals need to drop the ACM.

take five minutes: support open access

tl;dr: Sign this petition to support open access for publicly-funded research!! http://wh.gov/6TH

Here's the situation: there's lots of scholarly work being done. And you, as a citizen of a country, are paying academics to do science (or whatever), write about it, and review the work of other scholars. The work that makes it through the reviewing process gets published, typically in a journal or at a conference.

Here's the problem: a lot of that scholarly work is then inaccessible to you. You have to pay to read it, and often you have to pay a lot. If you're at a well-funded academic institution, your university library has to pay a lot. It's a serious problem for universities as wealthy as Harvard. Where does this money go to? It doesn't go to the academics who wrote the papers, or those who reviewed them: it goes to publishing companies with absurd profit margins who have trouble pointing at what value they add to the process, aside happening to own prestigious journals.

Concretely, this is a problem for the independent researcher, for the small business developer-of-stuff who wants to get the latest developments, for the interested public who wants to read and learn and grow, for the precocious teenager. I've come to care kind of a lot about this issue: it's because I believe in science. I think it's pretty important: it should get out to as many people as possible, not just because the citizens paid for it in the first place, but also so we can make progress faster.

The National Institutes of Health have famously set up an Open Access mandate: all the research that they fund must be available to the public pretty soon after it's published. Many universities are doing the same thing. The Association for Computational Linguistics (who run the conferences and journals where I'm personally likely to publish), do a bang-up job of making all of their articles publicly available, and I'm really proud to be associated with them. But not every professional organization, and not every field's journal are like this. Most are not!

How can you help? Right now, there's a petition on the White House website where you can ask the administration to expand the NIH-style mandate to other funding agencies: I'd really appreciate if you'd take a minute to make an account and sign the petition. Click here: http://wh.gov/6TH

(hrm, I seem to have written about this back in 2007 too)

this blog post: for you, $50.

I recently met a fellow who's working on a doctorate in literature, but his previous background is in Library Science^W. I wasn't sure what the interesting problems in library science might be, so I wandered over to the wikipedia article and started falling through the links.

A few links out, I ran into the Serials Crisis article. Apparently (and Wikipedia articles close to the "Library Science" one are never wrong), the costs of subscribing to scholarly journals keep on going up -- libraries only have so much money for subscriptions, but there are ever-more academics and subfields, thus more journals. And if a given library cancels its subscription from a particular journal, that publisher's fixed costs are still fixed, so prices increase for the remaining subscribers.

The traditional academic journal system had seemed pretty shaky, especially in light of the Web; upsetting publisher websites (Springer, ACM Portal, IEEE's site...) seem like their sole purpose is to keep the enterprising students from reading an article. In light of how most of the science behind the articles is publicly funded in the first place, the articles seem like they should be public as well.

I wouldn't mind seeing companies like Springer just going away; universities seem totally capable of hosting journals -- over the web especially! There may be some compelling reason for the current system, and I'll try to find it out... but for the short term, tools like Google Scholar could go a little further out of their way to help us find the full text of an article!

Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_journal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_publishing
The Serials Crisis: A White Paper for the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholarly Communications Convocation
The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing