Here is a development on the "who can read the scientific literature" front, if you rank computer science as part of the scientific literature:
ACM is introducing the ACM Author-Izer, a unique service that enables ACM authors to post links on either their own web page or institutional repository for visitors to download the definitive version of their articles from the ACM Digital Library at no charge.
So authors may distribute unlimited digital reprints of their own articles published in ACM (Assoc. for Computing Machinery) journals while ACM maintains the archive and keeps the statistics on downloads.
I've noticed some authors who have pre-emptively taken this liberty with Science, Nature, and other journals. They just include digital copies of the published versions of their papers on their personal web-sites for anyone to download. What the ACM is doing is better for the journals since they learn what is being downloaded, they keep an ongoing role as archival repositories of the literature, and they don't appear simply as freeloading squatters collecting rents on intellectual progress.
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