ACM subscription?
I’m thinking of becoming an ACM member, mostly because I want access to the digital library. The price, however, is a bit steep: $99 for professional membership, then another $99 for the library. (Discounts don’t seem to apply to me… I’m not a student, nor a member of any SIGs, and Florida is probably not on their list of developing countries. ;-)
So now I’m wondering, does anybody here have experience with this? Is it worth it? (I’m mostly interested in access to papers about programming languages. Of course, access to books and courses doesn’t hurt either, but the papers are my main concern right now.)
Grant Rettke said,
September 6, 2009 @ 10:53 pm
Here are two compelling arguments:
1. They’ve got the digital library.
2. They are the only professional organization related focused on computing (besides IEEE depending upon how you look at it).
It only takes one of those to make it worth it :).
Ray Rischpater said,
September 6, 2009 @ 11:30 pm
I totally agree with what Grant Rettke says.
I did it first about six years ago, and am so glad I did it! The DL access is excellent — not only has it helped me as a practicing software engineer, but I’ve been able to pursue a lot of topics I’m interested in during my own time.
I belong to both the IEEE and ACM, and every year consider dropping IEEE — but I wouldn’t give up the ACM and DL access. Very, very worth it — both for sponsoring an excellent professional organization, and for the access to the library. And little extras like the CACM showing up every month are nice, too!
John Cowan said,
September 6, 2009 @ 11:50 pm
If you want specific stuff, ask me. I have no respect for their paywall, not when there is a freely-redistributable-for-education-or-research notice at the bottom of page one of every article.
Parijat said,
September 7, 2009 @ 12:16 am
Citeseer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/) links to freely accessible versions of many papers. I have been able to find most papers in the ACM DL at citeseer.
Rui Ferreira said,
September 7, 2009 @ 2:55 am
VPN through your ex-university account.
Ids said,
September 7, 2009 @ 6:11 am
The professional membership gives you access to lots of books and courses, so you don’t need the extra DL subscription for that. I’ve had the DL subscription for 1 year, which is useful in itself (easy access to the research papers), but I found it too expensive. However, as noted above you can find a large part of the similar papers via citeseer or google. Very often the authors of papers remain a PDF copy on their home pages which can be found by google :-)
Tobias Svensson said,
September 7, 2009 @ 11:12 am
In my opinion the price is half as bad as it seems. First of all, it makes sense to think about how that money is spent. The ACM is organizing and supporting most of the important conferences in computer science, which is (still) the main path of distribution of current research efforts. Therefore, you are directly supporting computer science research, which I don’t think is a bad thing after all.
Besides that, and to anwer your question, yes, the digital library is definitely worth the investment. Even though many papers are freely available on arXiv, Citeseer, or the authors homepages, many others are not. And you save yourself from the hassle of trying to find the papers on Google.
Hope that helps.
Mark said,
September 7, 2009 @ 7:02 pm
Been a member of both the ACM and the IEEE for a number of years. If you’re interested in computing as a science, you aren’t going to find any other resources with the same bang for your buck.
Bill Mill said,
September 8, 2009 @ 8:43 am
Half the papers I want are only available in “official” form from springer-verlag or IEEE, so the price is much too high for me. I ask friends to help me steal science when I need an article and it’s not available on google / google scholar / citeseer / arXiv.