[neilc]

I thought this was obvious to everyone? ACM, IEEE, and the rest of the scientific publishing establishment are antiquated dinosaurs. They will eventually adapt to the existence of the Internet. Thankfully, in CS, they are mostly just a nuisance -- access to the scientific literature in other fields is significantly less open.

To be fair to IEEE, the ACM's official policy is at least as bad.

Actually, the ACM are a little bit more reasonable: authors typically have to sign over copyright, but they retain the right to post "author-prepared" versions of papers on their personal web sites, albeit with an ACM copyright blurb attached (most people ignore that requirement, though).

[gcb]

The tricky is to remember that an exact copy of the article can be called pre-published version by the author and nobody can say it isn't.

and if you are very afraid, you can just remove or add one meaningless coma. that should get you covered.

disclaimer: i'm not an IP lawyer. Also I do not subscribe to ancient extortion business models like ACM

[rick_2047]

I would certainly like a confirmation of this. If I remove a whole paragraph (like of acknowledgements or related research (which is already covered in the reference section)) does that mean that the paper is not owned by the journal? What if I make my own formatting and change the conclusion paragraph?

[neilc]

Per http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#De...:

"As part of their retained rights, authors may revise their ACM-copyrighted work. If the new work is substantially developed, it is considered a new derivative work. The author owns the copyright in the new work and may do as she wishes with it. The author must incorporate a citation to the previous work with a notice ... If the work is a minor revision, copyright remains with ACM."

[adrianN]

From the same site:

"The original copyright holder retains: [...] The right to post author-prepared versions of the work covered by ACM copyright in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer, and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include this notice both embedded within the full text file and in the accompanying citation display as well:

"© ACM, YYYY. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL#, ISS#, (DATE)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/nnnnnn.nnnnnn

[gcb]

You own the paper. You can publish it on your personal site before X in "© acm 200x". It's not your fault they didn't choose to take interest in the paper before that date...