The ACM ‘paywall,’ computing education research, and open access | Computing Education Blog

"I reference research papers regularly in this blog, often in the ACM Digital Library. I’ve been receiving more complaints lately when I reference papers 'behind a paywall.' After I linked to the article that Leo Porter, Beth Simon, Charlie McDowell, and I wrote about successful practices in CS1, someone tweeted that we were 'whores' by allowing our paper to be sold by ACM. As Greg Wilson said to me, the support for open access in our community is “vehement.” Now, there is a petition demanding that the ACM open up the Digital Library, free of charge. I’m a computing education researcher in the ACM SIGCSE community. 'Open access'  is much more complicated in my community. The arguments for opening access are more subtle in under-funded and even non-funded education community.  The British Academy has just released a set of papers (July 2013) on the challenges of fitting social science and humanities research into open access models.  They argue that we need a ‘mixed economy’ because there are different expectations and funding models for research in different disciplines.  Open access is different for computing education research than other areas of computer science because it is a social science. Why Education is more complicated for Open Access The case for open access is made in the first sentence of the petition: Computer science research is largely funded by the public, for the public good. There are two cases to consider: the research that is funded by the public, and the research that is not. Let’s start with the research that is not funded publicly, because that’s a big part of what makes education unusual. Many (maybe most) of the papers published at the SIGCSE Symposium and the ICER Conference are not supported by public funds ..."