THE FEBRUARY 1978
ISSUE OF CACM FEATURED
THE LANDMARK PAPER
“A METHOD FOR OBTAINING
DIGITAL SIGNATURE AND
PUBLIC-KEY CRYPTOSYSTEMS”
BY RONALD L. RIVEST,
ADI SHAMIR, AND LEONARD
ADLEMAN. THE NEW CACM
REVITALIZATION PLAN AIMS TO
DRAW RESEARCH WORK
OF GREAT INFLUENCE
INTO THE FOLD.
reducing the role of the editorial advisory board left a void.
By the mid-2000s, it was
increasingly clear that CACM
needed attention. When Dave
Patterson became ACM President in 2005, “fixing” CACM
became one of the priorities of
his presidency. In his January
2006 “President’s Letter,” he
wrote “When I was running for
ACM President, I asked people
for feedback about the Association. The consistent advice I
received was to do something
... about Communications of the
ACM.” Plainly speaking, by
2005 dissatisfaction with
CACM has become quite pervasive in broad segments of the
computing community.
While the format envisioned
in the early 1980s was that of a
content-rich magazine, the
reduced role of the editorial
advisory board combined with a
relatively small professional staff
meant that most of the content
came from submitted articles.
Over the years those articles have
evolved to be strongly slanted
toward Management Information Systems. Over time, a significant segment of the ACM
membership lost interest in the
publication.
Patterson argued that this
state of affairs was unacceptable,
concluding “ACM must present
a compelling value proposition
for individuals to join or stay
members of ACM. This means
our flagship publication must be
the best it can possibly be.”
In mid-2005, Patterson commissioned the CACM Task
Force to discuss how best to
tackle the revitalization of
CACM. Their conversations
took into account the weak-nesses within CACM coverage,
the evolving composition of
ACM membership, its outdated
design, the emergence of the
Web and the ACM Digital
Library, and the introduction of
Queue, ACM’s magazine for
young practitioners that debuted
in 2003.
Patterson’s Task Force, like the
1983 counterparts, was heavily
influenced by the content model
of Science, one the most prestigious scientific publications
(being published in Science is a
career milestone for a scientist).
Science’s content consists of an
extensive news section, several
columns (policy, education, and
book reviews), and research articles. While the research articles
are aimed at specialists, about
one-third of the articles in each
issue are accompanied by a short
