[krschultz]

Most white papers are written by professors and students who are supported by grants. These grants generally come from DARPA, the NSF, or other federal programs. All that money comes from the taxpayers.

Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it.

A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society

B) This is an issue worth far more of the easily drummed up internet outrage than most of the silly things we all get worked up about, yet it seems to fly under the radar most of the time

[Lewisham]

This is the most aggravating part of it for me (I'm a PhD student who has stuff in the ACM library); I'm paid for by the NSF, but my understanding is that the NSF does not require the papers to be freely available. I think there may be some countries/grants that do force open the publications they funded.

The problem is systemic, and will only be changed by direct, large-scale intervention. Fortunately, the US government is really well positioned to do that. If all the NSF funded papers went away tomorrow, you can bet IEEE and ACM would change. The question is whether the government will do this, but they haven't show all that much interest so far.

[eegilbert]

The NSF has recently instituted a mandatory data-sharing policy reminiscent of the NIH. So, it's not unthinkable that they would do this.

[larsberg]

As another PhD student, I don't really get all of the rage. In practice, everything post-1997 is easily accessible, and if you're searching through CiteseerX you probably won't even notice the difference. I won't claim it's a great system, but there is observational equivalence with "free and unencumbered publication" modulo a 3" x 4" blurb of text on the lower-left of the first page of the document.

Except for a select few Springer-Verlag publications (mainly the more book-chapter-like ones).

[patrickyeon]

When you are no longer a student, it will not be so easy. IEEE and ACM (at least) will charge you for articles, and without an IP address registered to your university, all you'll see is abstracts.

[larsberg]

No, what I'm saying is that you can get exactly the same paper through CiteseerX, modulo the copyright (which is all that changes between the preprint and final).

[waterlesscloud]

If Obama is serious about encouraging innovation, here's an easy way to do it.

Require that federally funded papers be publicly available at no charge.

[bbb]

Not to forget that IEEE/ACM also take a big cut out of every conference budget. In fact, the cut is significant enough that budgets are fudged (frequently at that, I suspect).

This drives up attendance fees, which are of course reimbursed from tax payer money...