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Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access
- PaulHoule 10mo agoMight make me join the ACM again!
- guerby 10mo agoSame for me, I sent emails about open access to the ACM circa 1995 when I was still a student. After a while I dropped my ACM subscription. It just took them 30 years :)
- PaulHoule 10mo agoFor me it was that and their unqualified support of H-1B visas. The ACM always said it wanted to build bridges with practitioners but paywalled journals aren't the way to do it. I would be 100% for more green cards or a better guestworker program of some kind, but I've seen so many good people on H-1Bs twisted into knots... Like the time the startup I was working for hired a new HR head and two weeks in treated an H-1B so bad the HR person quit. I wanted to tell this guy "your skills are in demand and you could get a job across the street" but that's wasn't true. I joined the IEEE Computer Society because it had a policy to not have a policy which I could accept.
- the-grump 10mo agoLong overdue.
- SkyWolf 10mo agoI get the Notice : "Your IP Address has been blocked", i am from algeria by the way, not sure why my country is blocked.
- elashri 10mo agoI think they probably have aggressive firewall with a lot of false positives. I live in Switzerland and got blocked but tried a VPN to US and it worked. Although it is usually that I get blocked for using VPN. But I'm not sure if it is about your IP or the whole country but I guess it the former. Who knows what the firewall god at Cloudflare does.
- thenthenthen 10mo agoThats weird. Fine from China (wonder what host they are using)
- brodo 10mo agoThey block agressively. Not only based on IP adresses. If you visit the site with a privacy-focussed browser or in private mode they will also tell you your IP is blocked.
- liampulles 10mo agoGive me a reading list! What are great publications in the ACM that one should read come January?
- vbarrielle 10mo agoI don't think old publications will become open access, only new ones.
- Jtsummers 10mo agoThey made most of their archive open access a few years ago.
- layer8 10mo agoOnly up to 2000. It’s unclear if the catalog from 2000 to 2025 will be fully made open. There may be legal obstacles if the originating authors and institutions don’t consent. I haven’t been able to find anything that states otherwise. What changes in January is the policy for new publications.
- justin66 10mo agoWhat's different legally about the publications prior to 2000?
- layer8 10mo agoI don’t know, but they only opened the backfile up to 2000: https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-backfile https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-b... Or at least they haven’t explicitly announced anything in that vein for post-2000.
- justincormack 10mo agoEverything is going to be open, they have been saying this for ages. The issue isnt rights, they have those, its been funding this.
- trainyperson 10mo agoThe financials of open access are interesting. Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1] Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free. 1. https://authors.acm.org/open-access https://authors.acm.org/open-access
- cs_throwaway 10mo agoSurprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)
- woliveirajr 10mo agoDidn't expect Brazil being off the "List of Countries Qualifying for APC Waivers" Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.
- coliveira 10mo agoThese publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.
- zipy124 10mo agoThis is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also. Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil. [1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/ https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/
- dhruv3006 10mo agoThis is great news!
- poorman 10mo agoThis is huge. A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science optimizations. The ACM programming competitions in college are some of my fondest memories!
- sundarurfriend 10mo ago> A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science optimizations. Note that older articles have already been open access for a while now: > April 7, 2022 > ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of its publishing program. These articles, published between 1951 and the end of 2000, are now open and freely available to view and download via the ACM Digital Library. - https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-backfile https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-b...
- checker659 10mo agoNow, only if IEEE would follow suit.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nycerrrrrrrrrr 10mo agoConflicted. Obviously open access is great, but it's never been that difficult to find most papers either on arxiv or the author's website. And I despise the idea of paying to publish, especially since unlike other fields the "processing" required for CS papers is minimal (e.g., we handle our own formatting). FWIW, USENIX conference papers are both open access and free to publish. My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
- Jtsummers 10mo ago> My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers. ACM started this open access effort back in 2020, I don't think that LLM generated papers were on their mind when they started it.
- leoc 10mo agoAnd they spent years resisting pressure for open access before that: this has been in the air for a long time.
- ryeguy_24 10mo agoWhen I read the publications (the ACM magazine), I swear sometimes the content feels LLM generated. Does anyone else get that impression? In general, I'm not very impressed with the content (I'm used to WIRED, btw).
- leoc 10mo agoThe Digital Library contains a lot of older material which predates the Web and has often never been put online anywhere else: old Joint Computer Conference papers and so on.
- kleiba 10mo ago> e.g., we handle our own formatting I used to work for a small publisher some years ago, and while this is true to some degree, we spent a lot of effort doing additional formatting or correcting formatting mistakes. For a typical journal publication, this process alone takes weeks if you're aiming at a high-quality publication. On top of that, there are a lot of small things that you typically don't get if a paper is just put on the author's website, such as e.g. long-term archiving, a DOI, integration with services like dblp, metadata curation, etc. Now, to what degree these features are an added value to you personally varies from person to person. Some people or even workshops are totally fine with simply publishing the PDFs written by the authors on a website, and there's nothing wrong with that, ymmv.
- alexpotato 10mo agoThis article about how to go from manual processes to automation is still one of the greatest ACM publications ever written: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520
- jhallenworld 10mo agoSo this link is interesting for a different reason: look at the references at the end of the paper. It's awesome that the references include URLs. IMHO, old papers should all be updated to include such hyperlinks. I'm pleased that the references to other ACM papers do work. But try to click on this one: Bainbridge, L. 1983. Ironies of automation. Automatica 19(6): 775-779; https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0713/bb9d9b138e4e0a15406006de9b0cddf68e28.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0713/bb9d9b138e4e0a15406006... Fail! No way to read the paper without paying or pirating by using scihub (and even if you do get the .pdf via scihub, its references are not hyperlinks). This does not help humanity, it makes us look like morons. FFS, even the music industry was able to figure this out.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- YesThatTom2 10mo agoI’ll see what I can do!
- jhallenworld 10mo agoI'm not blaming you. By providing links, your citations go beyond what is required for academic papers. Would it be rude to print the link "https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8" but actually link to https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8 when you click it? :-) The DOI is key, then you can use a browser extension to do it, for example: https://github.com/natir/Redirector_doi_sci-hub https://github.com/natir/Redirector_doi_sci-hub
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- elashri 10mo agoJust friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that). That's because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees (thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.
- tokai 10mo agoOpen Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.
- elashri 10mo agoI don't disagree that the ultimate goal is have open and free access is a noble goal. I just point our that what is happening in practice is that it is being taken as a new business model that pays on average more for the publishers. I'm not sure my comment implies I criticize the open access concept and I apologize if it is not clear.
- seanhunter 10mo agoI have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid for any peer review I've ever done and none of those was for an open access publication.
- privong 10mo ago> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).
- jhallenworld 10mo agoCome on IEEE...
- shevy-java 10mo agoOk that's good but ... what exactly will be open accessed? Do they keep a lot of what is important or interesting? I really don't know right now. They should have also added the relevancy of that announcement; right now I just don't know what will all be opened, so I hope to find this information in the comments here.
- justincormack 10mo agoits a huge amount of high quality content. See https://dl.acm.org https://dl.acm.org. The older stuff was opened a few years back.
- Tarucho 10mo agoWill they end up using ads? (not joking)
- TheRealPomax 10mo agoAre you going to reverse your nonsense "these publications already come with a summary, so we've added a worse, AI generated summary and making that the first thing you see instead" decision though?
- logifail 10mo agoI wish there were more open discussions about how "Journal Impact Factor" came to be so important. It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports).
- specialp 10mo agoIt is almost unanimously agreed upon that impact factor is a flawed way of assessing scientific output, and there are a lot of ideas on how this could be done better. None of them have taken hold. Publishers are mostly a reputation cartel. Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.
- mmooss 10mo agoIt's flawed, but what is a better idea? We definitely need curation.
- rnewme 10mo agoGreat news. I've bookmarked an article back in 2009 but didn't want to pay $80 for it.
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoA lot of discussion about the benefits/drawbacks of open access publishing, but I don't see anybody talking about the other thing that's coming along with this commitment to open access: the ACM is introducing a "premium" membership tier behind which various features of the Digital Library will be paywalled. From their info page [0], "premium" features include: * Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery * AI-generated article summaries * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions * Advanced search * Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and citations received * Bulk citation exports and PDF downloads The AI-generated article summaries has been getting a lot of discussion in my social circles. They have apparently fed many (all?) papers into some LLM to generate summaries... which is absurd when you consider that practically every article has an abstract as part of its text and submission. These abstract were written by the authors and have been reviewed more than almost any other part of the articles, so they are very unlikely to contain errors. In contrast, multiple of my colleagues have found errors of varying scales in the AI-generated summaries of their own papers — many of which are actually longer than the existing abstracts. In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials. I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing. [0] https://dl.acm.org/premium https://dl.acm.org/premium [1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/ https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."
- rbanffy 10mo agoNow if only the IEEE did the same…
- andrenarchy 10mo agoCEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates. Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
- denotational 10mo ago> Good publishing costs money Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?
- andrenarchy 10mo agoHappy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary. Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
- mmooss 10mo agoThank you for contributing your expertise and experience. > long-term preservation How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files. > Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
- YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo agoI don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but perhaps that's because I don't need a "reputation". I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.
- mmooss 10mo ago> I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything Why do research if you don't publish it? It's like running a farm and letting the food rot in the fields every year, nobody eating it. The value of knowledge is sharing it with others. In a history of technology and science I read, the author pointed out that likely there have been many discoveries that, because they weren't shared outside the village, are lost to time (including because of a lack of widespread literacy). You might add the arts to that - how many great stories were lost?
- DamonHD 10mo agoI am doing a PhD (by publication, self-funded) because I want to improve how we are decarbonising home heating in the UK, and one target audience is academics, and those papers also support communications with policy makers and industry. As I have made clear to my supervisors the PhD would be a nice bauble side-effect of this climate fixing work.
- YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo ago[dead]
- meindnoch 10mo agoI don't care, I'll keep using sci-hub.
- nickagliano 10mo agoThere’s some nuance to this surrounding the “creative commons” licensing of these ACM publications. Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND). Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons. Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman: “Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.” This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category. #FreeAlanTuring
- hinkley 10mo agoIs this going to include all of their back catalog? I’ve had a lot of free time lately and decided I’ve been missing the SIGPLAN proceedings and have b been procrastinating on reactivating my old membership to get them. I stopped when the paper version went away, which is ages ago now.
- nodesocket 10mo agoHow is this Discords fault at all? I thought almost all bug bounties don’t apply to 3rd party services.
- sega_sai 10mo agoThe natural change from this are the journals with no cost of publication. There is no way that the added value of the journal is thousands of dollars, especially given that the referees work for free. In astrophysics we already have a journal like that is gaining traction after several publishers switched to golden open access. The system when the taxpayer subsidizes enormous profit margins of Elsevier etc while relying on free work by referees is crazy
- andreyf 10mo agoGreat news, and hopefully more to come across other publications! If only aaronsw was here to see it :(
- algernonramone 10mo agoIt's not immediately clear from reading this what this means for ACM books, both older ones and new ones. I'm a fan of a lot of their older books, such as the Turing Award Lecture anthology they published in the early 1990s. I'm also interested in some of the newer books they've published in the last several years (The tributes to Dijkstra and Hoare especially stand out). I really hope these are included as well.
- NamlchakKhandro 10mo agoi dont even understand why these things exist... just publish your stuff in a website... on a blog, on github....
- basedid 10mo ago[dead]
- rvnx 10mo agoFinally! Free material to ingest in our LLMs (while it violates copyright, it's good for the humanity as the reasoning of LLMs can lead to new discoveries and more widespread knowledge).
- krick 10mo agoVery good and appreciated, but I think for math/CS the problem is essentially solved by virtue of having arxiv.org strongly embedded into the culture, so I consider it just a PR stunt. Thanks nevertheless.
- quantum_state 10mo agoThis is good news for modern man.
- basedid 10mo ago[dead]
- nektro 10mo agowow this is wonderful news!
- WalterBright 10mo agoPerhaps a system where the University publishes papers written by its researchers, and nobody else. That way, there is gatekeeping in the form of the University not hiring researchers who are kooks or frauds. The University's incentive would be maintaining their reputation.
- psychoslave 10mo agoWill it be retro-active? I stopped my ACM subscription after they broke their deal with access to O’Reilly platform. And if I want to access ACM in general I can use my wikpedia library credential I guess, but possibly there was things still unavailable through that partnership.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- notarobot123 10mo agoDoes this kind of general shift more firmly establish a marketplace and business model for eminent "peers" to more easily create independent journals? Universities increasingly price in this pay to publish model so groups of editors could very easily corner their respective niches with independent publications if they cooperate with one another. The market is ripe for fragmentation. Maybe this is wishful thinking but a proliferation of openly accessible and competing independent publications could correct for a lot of the ills of the Goodhart effect in academic publishing. Market shifts that make this evolutionary pathway feasible and realistic are exiting.
- pfdietz 10mo agoMany already were.
- jll29 10mo agoAfter ACL, now ACM set its papers free; let'S hope IEEE will be next.