13 Jun
2014
13 Jun
'14
10:04 p.m.
I was on the Usenix board when we decided to stop publishing Computing
Systems. One of the key problems, not yet mentioned, was that the
readership was too small. Several very good papers went elsewhere because
the authors correctly felt that few people would see them if they
published in CS. A related problem was that many university libraries
were reluctant to subscribe. It seems that a certain critical mass is
necessary to make a journal viable, and we never quite got there with
CS...
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 12:03 AM, Norman Wilson
<norman(a)oclsc.org> wrote:
USENIX now makes all their conference papers
available online,
free to anyone, except that only those registered for a
conference can read them before the conference actually happens.
That's not a bad substitute for a journal, I suppose.
âThank you Norman.â
âAs President of USENIX during that choice, that is a legacy I am
particularly proud. It was a bit of a scary thing to do and so far ACM
and
IEEE have been loath to follow suite as completely (I suspect because the
digital library is (was) a significant source of revenue for all three
organizations). [To be fair, there are some exceptions, I believe ACM
Queue is downloadable - although I note that it is interesting a lot of
people working on Queue are also USENIX folks some of whom may be lurking
on this mailing list].
For what ever its worth, just a month or so ago, I was very pleased to see
my now Sr in college CS major daughter -- who went to her first USENIX
conference in 1993 in stroller -- just joined USENIX (maybe its a little
like joining "the party"). But if USENIX is to continue their tradition
of
being open and freely accessible, I offer an unabashed advertisement (i.e
no pay walls): like her and her college peers, please consider a USENIX
membership and/or going to a conference or two.
To Doug's question -- I agree that the answers about "Computing Systems"
that have been given are pretty much to the mark. It was not an
insignificant undertaking to publish such a journal; and keeping
it/dropping was a trade off.
To all on the list, I can say that the Board has toyed with bring it back
a
couple of times when I was on it. If any of you have thoughts on the
matter, send them to the current Board of Directors ( bod(a)usenix.org )
and/or the Executive Director: Casey Henderson (execdir(a)usenix.org)
Clem
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