I’ve been griping on Twitter about the fact that the official copies of most IEEE and ACM papers are hidden behind paywalls, which is a great way to ensure that they don’t reach people in industry who might otherwise, you know, read them, learn something, and possibly even adopt the tools, practices, or ideas they contain. Luckily, most researchers routinely break those copyright agreements and post their work on their own sites, so I’m actually able to read some of the papers that were presented at ICSE 2011 this year. The best so far is Kathryn Stolee and Sebastian Elbaum’s “Refactoring Pipe-like Mashups for End-User Programmers“, in which they look at the dataflows people are constructing using Yahoo! Pipes [1] and categorize ways of reorganizing them to eliminate redundancy, improve efficiency, and so on. It’s solid, practical work, and the paper is a pleasure to read.
[1] Pipes is the best approximation I’ve seen to date of something that puts the power of the mashable web in the hands of everyday people. If you haven’t seen it, give it a try, and then round up some friends and create an open source clone using HTML5, processing.js, and similar tools.
Love Yahoo! Pipes. I actually have a number of publication feeds that I’m interested in (JAIR, etc) aggregated and pumped through Pipes. A very nice first step is to use dapper:
- http://open.dapper.net/
Creates a feed where none existed before
. The dapper+pipes combo is quite powerful, but it would be great to have something similar that you could run on your own server (pipes can be flakey with their update frequency at times).
The libraries at most larger corporations and research facilities also have accounts (and often paper subscriptions) with the major associations, journal publishers, etc. – it’s how the journal publishers make money, after all! This means that yes, people in industry do have access. It’s one of the competitive advantages of being a larger corporation.
DRE Toronto, Alias, UofT, HP, UHN – I think I’ve worked for more companies with access to various paywalls than without…
just a minor correction: ACM allows authors to post their papers on their own website.