[TUHS] UNIX magazines

[scj at yaccman.com]

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 at 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.
>>
>
> ​Thank you Norman.​
>
> ​As 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 at usenix.org )
> and/or the Executive Director:  Casey Henderson (execdir at usenix.org).
>
>
> Clem
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