CACM Opinion Argues for Licensing the ACM Digital Library to LLMs — 176 Points and 147 Mostly Hostile Comments

Communications of the ACM / Hacker News·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

A Communications of the ACM opinion piece arguing that now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library drew 176 points and 147 comments on HN, most of them from ACM members objecting. The dominant complaints: academics supply the papers unpaid, then absorb the downstream cost of student AI use and degraded peer review; licensing fees favor large labs over unfunded open-source projects, so it 'gives more power to the larger players'; and models have already ingested this corpus via Sci-Hub and scraping, making the licensing question partly theatrical. One recurring framing is that ACM prioritizing fee extraction is 'the least of our priorities' relative to the state of academic publishing itself.