It wasn't clear to me by looking at the pages themselves. I hope usability will not be a huge issue and negate the benefit of this open access!
The actual marginal cost for a digital publication is negligible, as demonstrated by arxiv.org, archive.org, and sci-hub.
The reason why ACM and IEEE charge so much for digital library access is that they use the money for unrelated purposes.
As for sci-hub? They’re just taking the finished work. It’s like saying software shouldn’t cost much because The Pirate Bay can deliver software for free.
> > That process costs money because it takes people and time to do it well. Journal subscriptions are often not enough to recover those costs.
Some of the items left to consider here are actually putting together the reviewed papers and publishing them. I would say the cost of these two items has gone down with the extended use of computers over the last 3 decades.
What other items are left? It would be interesting to know.
It's a shame too since SIGGRAPH runs ACM's most popular conference(s) with many thousands of attendees and high registration fees ($875 "discounted" pregistration for a virtual conference? are you kidding?) and can almost certainly afford the negligible costs for digital publication.
Well here's hoping we'll get real open access for everything by ... 2025. ;-/
Until then: google scholar, sci-hub, or donate your $99 to ACM.
The string they're blocking isn't [Ll]ynx, it's libwww. Which Lynx has in its user agent string. They're not blocking wget or curl.
It's probably a misguided attempt to block custom written bots, maybe a particular one they've had trouble with in the past.
...as a part of its landmark campaign for its 75th anniversary celebrations, ACM is opening up a large portion of its archives, making the first 50 years of its published records—more than 117,500 documents dating from 1951 to 2000—accessible to the public without a login.
* A paper from the inaugural issue of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software in 1975: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/355626.355636
* The UNIX time-sharing system by Ritchie & Thompson. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800009.808045
* A Conversation with Steve Jobs. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/63334.63336
Edit: More info -
In January 2020, ACM launched an ambitious five-year plan to transition the Association into an Open Access Publisher. The foundation of that plan is a new model called ACM Open, which asks research institutions around the world to underwrite the costs of publication for their affiliated authors. Over the past two years, nearly 200 research institutions have already signed on to ACM Open and ACM is fast approaching the first major milestone for the transition, when approximately 20% of ACM's newly published articles are Open Access upon publication in the ACM Digital Library.
Source: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/5/260362-thanks-for-the-...