Accessibility of the Database Literature

Richard T. Snodgrass
2001 SIGMOD record  
SIGMOD has had for the past few years an over-arching vision of enabling all information on the database field to be freely accessible to everyone. Of course, this goal runs smack into the economic realities of scientific publishing. So the SIGMOD Executive Committee over the period of 1997-2001 tempered its initial goals to the following strategy, emphasizing free CDROM accessibility first, followed by online accessibility, followed by reduced subscription prices. 1. Get all major database
more » ... erence proceedings and journals prior to 2000 into the SIGMOD Anthology, provided free to all SIGMOD members. 2. Get all ongoing conference proceedings and journals into the SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC), provided free to all SIGMOD members. 3. Ensure that this material is available online via publisher sites on the internet. 4. Negotiate cheaper electronic and print subscriptions to journals. We have been somewhat successful in this. Over the last year, the following progress has been made. ¯The full ACM Transactions on Database Systems is now included on the Anthology and DiSC, and SIGMOD members receive a free electronic subscription to this journal. ¯Kluwer's Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal was approved by Scott Delman for inclusion in both the Anthology and DiSC. ¯Elsevier offered SIGMOD members substantially discounted rates to its Information Systems journal, of $45 for an individual electronic subscription and $99 for an individual print subscription. ¯Springer offered to ACM members a substantially discounted combined electronic and print subscription rate to the Very Large Databases Journal, of $45 per year. ¯Permission was given for ACM DL, ACM Hypertext, KRDB and XP conference proceedings and for the SIGIR Forum to be added to the Anthology and DiSC. ¯Permission was granted for the CoopIS, POS, and SSD proceedings, for Jan Chomicki's Logics for Databases and Information Systems, Jim Gray's Benchmark, Mike Stonebraker's Ingres Papers, and Gio Wiederhold's Database Design books, and for GTE technical reports to be added to the Anthology. ¯The missing individual proceedings of ADBIS'99, CIKM'92 and EDBT'98 were added to the Anthology, and EDBT'02 was confirmed for DiSC'03. ¯SIGMOD is the first ACM special interest group with all of its material on the web, including conference proceedings, newsletter, ACM TODS, and video and audio of keynote addresses. ¯ACM is following SIGMOD's lead. All journals back to the beginning have been digitized, the remaining conference proceedings are being digitized, and work on newsletters for the other SIGs will commence soon. ¯Other publishers are following suit. Five out of the six top database journals are now fully digitized, with encouragement from SIGMOD. Some of this material was included in volumes 2-4 of the Anthology, distributed earlier this year; the rest will be included in the next volume.
dblp:journals/sigmod/Snodgrass01a fatcat:avymodk5f5gb3g34yedoxrfyaa