Usenix Open Access
I was going to pick up posting again and what better way to do that than to point to today's announcement by Usenix to open up the access to all of their conference proceedings. Compared to the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM, who still hide the published material behind the walls of their digital libraries, Usenix already had a very liberal one-year-members-only policy. But now their publications will be available for everyone, instantly.
I am a Usenix, ACM & IEEE member and will remain one, so it doesn't make much of a difference to me, but I believe all professional organizations would serve their members better by making their publications freely available to public.
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I fully agree. In fact, given that the societies have been forced to allow people to post their content on their own sites, I don't understand the benefit to protecting new content in the digital libraries. Of course, if they open the libraries, people (and institutions) will no longer be paying those nice subscription fees. USENIX can do this because it never was really using this as a large factor in their finances, I presume.
Sure, IEEE & ACM may see a decline in membership that they have been able to hold off on because of the exclusive rights to the digital libraries.But just like record companies will have to reinvent themselves to be more valuable to the musician and the consumer, these professional organizations will have to find ways to be more usefull to their members to make them want to have a membership. Just holding on the control of content of which in general there are copies out there in the wild is not a good long term strategy.
With respect to the digital libraries they have great content, historical and new. I am sure there are some folks out there who can think of very novels ways to innovate on top of this content to make it more usefull than just the papers itself. I am happy to pay for added service. Add some advertisement revenue and they should be able to go a long way to a solid interesting product.
I have always been more than happy to pay my Usenix dues. if I didn't benefit from it for a year, I am sure somebody else did. Or they used it to innovate with conferences/workshops, etc. ACM/IEEE membership I don't really pay wholheartedly.