From the Chair. . .

The issue of how to make data and publications as openly available as possible is receiving
increasing attention. SIGIR 2012 convened a panel to talk about the interplay between proprietary(non-open) data, reproducibility, and science. Elsewhere in this issue of the Forum is a summaryof the panel presentation and the following discussion. There are people who care passionately
about this topic from several perspectives and it seems likely that some changes will occur toreflect the communitys feelings. I strongly encourage you to read the article and make yourself
heard, even if only by the SIGIR Executive.
Also related to open access, but on the publication front, the ACM is making changes to its
digital library policies. Many of the changes are intended to support open access to articles inthe library though the ACM currently has no intention of moving to a model where publications
are free. (SIGIR members already have access to all papers from SIGIR-sponsored conferences.)
Some highlights of the changes:• The copyright transfer is being replaced with a license that allows the ACM to publish thepaper. This change has no effect in practice, but may allow less restrictive licenses later.
• An author may pay ACM to make a work freely available forever. In this case the ACM willhold a limited license to publish the paper for free in the digital library forever. It will notbe cheap.
• A SIG may now allow free access to its proceedings for a month around the conference.
• The possibility for a SIG to provide a list of papers in the most recent conferences and makelinks from that list (only) have free access to the papers. For example, SIGIR papers could
thus be accessible without fee for a year. Ultimately this would impact the SIGs revenue
from the digital library and dilute one of the SIGIR member benefits. For those reasons thisis a short-term experiment by the ACM.
Watch for announcements of these changes over the next year.
As announced at the SIGIR business meeting this past August, SIGIR is increasing its support
for student travel as part of a friends of SIGIR program. This program allows small and regional
events to apply for student travel support, currently capped at $5,000. SIGIR has provided thisfunding to HCIR 2012 (Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval), ADCS 2012
(Australasian Document Computing Symposium), and to the North American ComputationalLinguistics Olympiad (NACLO). These groups are required to publish brief reports about theirevent in SIGIR Forum, so look for those starting next issue. Information about applying is a
http://sigir.org/friends.html.
The current SIGIR Executives term ends this June. Members of SIGIR will be receiving
information about the slate of nominees by February, with voting running from April until midJune. Please vote.
I imagine that many of you are preparing submissions to SIGIR, aiming for the 2013 conferencein Dublin, Ireland, in July/August. Please mark your calendars for SIGIR 2014 in Gold Coast,Australia, and SIGIR 2015 in Santiago, Chile. The SIGIR Executive is currently considering bids
for SIGIR 2016 to be held somewhere in Europe. The decision will be announced by the new
SIGIR Executive at the business meeting in Dublin. Its not too early to start considering bids for
SIGIR 2017 to be held somewhere in Asia or Australia (see http://sigir.org/bid.html).
ACM SIGIR Forum1Vol. 46 No. 2 December 2012

Of course, SIGIR sponsors other conferences. CIKM 2012 has recently finished. WSDM 2013
will be in Rome, Italy, in February. JCDL 2013 will be in Indianapolis, Indiana, in July. Pleasecheck http://sigir.org/events/events-upcoming.html for a list of other events of interest to the IRcommunity.
As always, please touch base with me or any other member of the executive if you have any
issues that you feel should be discussed or if you wish to help with any of the SIGIR work.
James Allanchair sigir@acm.org

ACM SIGIR Forum

2Vol. 46 No. 2 December 2012