"The ACM, in common with other organizers, requires those who have papers published in its journals and conferences to sign over the copyright to them. This means that you can’t republish a paper elsewhere and that the ACM can charge for your writing without paying you any fee."
Really? So every CS researcher who posts their publications on their personal site is flagrantly violating ACM's copyright with no consequences? I don't see how this can be accurate.
Publication is only a part of the broader goal of disseminating ideas and results. Authors can expect ACM to contribute to this wider goal, and in particular to encourage dissemination in multiple forums. ACM expects authors to acknowledge ACM's contribution and not to publish the same material in other venues, except as permitted by ACM copyright policy.
Thus authors can expect ACM to:
* Allow a submission to be posted on home pages and public repositories before and after review
* Allow an authors' version of their own ACM-copyrighted work on their personal server or on servers belonging to their employers
* Allow metadata information, e.g., bibliographic, abstract, and keywords, for their individual work to be openly available
* Allow authors the right to reuse their figures in their own subsequent publications for which they have granted ACM copyright
* Provide statistics for each journal, transaction, and newsletter on its average turn-around time and its current backlog of articles.
And ACM expects authors to
* Appropriately acknowledge the publisher's effort
* Ensure that whenever the authors or their employers provide a link to a personal copy that there is a link to the ACM definitive version
* Ensure that all versions copyrighted by ACM bear the ACM copyright.
This would qualify as "green" open access ("gold" open access being provided directly by the journal). So you can blame authors for not posting their papers online if you feel so inclined.
ACM provides a clause which lets you upload pre-print versions of your work. In Computer Science, where its almost guaranteed the academic did the typesetting anyway, the pre-print and the actual camera-ready version is identical.
I was working for a university Computer Science department, and trying to build a paper repository. The library, which took copyright very seriously, was adamant that we couldn't store copies of the papers, and that the academics couldn't either on their own sites. The academics were very angry at this, and I got in the middle of a pretty vicious crossfire. It was the worst time I ever had at that job.
ACM doesn't police it. They don't want people setting up rival repositories, that's all. However, Citeseer seems to be skating on very thin ice, and Google Scholar has made it much easier to find those "pre-prints". I see ACM not as a professional organization but a conference organizer/authenticator. Their magazine is also pretty good too.
I don't think it is. The following is from the ACM's copyright assignment form [1]:
Each of the Employer/Author(s) retains the following rights ... The right to post author-prepared versions of the Work covered by the ACM copyright in a personal collection on
their own home page, on a publicly accessible server of their employer and in a repository legally mandated by the
agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and
personal use by others, and must include the following notice both embedded within the full text file and in the
accompanying citation display as well ...
In my area of CS at least, people nearly always hosted their own papers. Finding a free copy of a paper was never a problem -- it was just a matter of entering the paper's title in scholar.google.com, and clicking the first "edu" link that came up, instead of IEEE or ACM. This was faster to do than spending the 15 s switching on the VPN connection to the campus network.
I suppose students / professors hosting their own papers might have been unique to the area of CS I was studying...
The ACM grants back " The right to post author-prepared versions of the Work covered by the ACM copyright in a
personal collection on their own home page, on a publicly accessible server of their employer and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include the
following notice both embedded within the full text file and in the accompanying citation display as well: ..."
It doesn't seem fair. They charge a fee for others to read your article, but your rights to the same (your) article are limited to free access and only under limited circumstances.
You can generally post a user-generated version of your article for personal use on your personal server, not their typeset version. That usually means putting up the version that you submitted (in the generic Latex template), rather than the final version.
For every ACM conference I've seen that's the same version, though; they just print the PDF I personally prepare and submit to them, with no editing except maybe a script that slaps a header or footer onto it.
Really? So every CS researcher who posts their publications on their personal site is flagrantly violating ACM's copyright with no consequences? I don't see how this can be accurate.