Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.
Yep if something in CS and adjacent fields isn’t open access (or there’s a pre-print floating around somewhere) chances are it’s a textbook, not worth reading, or is obscure/arcane and was written with a typewriter. Heck some of the best stuff is blogposts by people who don’t happen to be in a publish or perish situation so why bother with journals. (Trouble with that, of course, is a lack of doi but what’s archive.org for).
Meanwhile there’s fields which can’t even figure out TeX.
Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.
Yep if something in CS and adjacent fields isn’t open access (or there’s a pre-print floating around somewhere) chances are it’s a textbook, not worth reading, or is obscure/arcane and was written with a typewriter. Heck some of the best stuff is blogposts by people who don’t happen to be in a publish or perish situation so why bother with journals. (Trouble with that, of course, is a lack of doi but what’s archive.org for).
Meanwhile there’s fields which can’t even figure out TeX.