Comments on: ACM subscription?

By: Bill Mill

Bill Mill — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:43:23 +0000

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.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:02:37 +0000

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.

By: Tobias Svensson

Tobias Svensson — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:12:43 +0000

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.

By: Ids

Ids — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:11:59 +0000

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 :-)

By: Rui Ferreira

Rui Ferreira — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:55:53 +0000

VPN through your ex-university account.

By: Parijat

Parijat — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:16:45 +0000

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.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:50:51 +0000

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.

By: Ray Rischpater

Ray Rischpater — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:30:00 +0000

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!

By: Grant Rettke

Grant Rettke — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:53:18 +0000

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 :).