Response to Jessica Harris’ Post on ACM Open and the exclusive rights to distribute authors' works

"ACM is committed to a 100% Open Access future. ACM remains one of the very few established Societies and Publishers that has committed to 100% OA with a stated timeline. It is ACM's plan to transition to 100% OA on January 1, 2026. We are approximately 50% of the way there when considering 3 primary metrics....(1) % of articles published annually; (2) % of subscribing institutions; and (3) % of digital library income needed to be financially sustainable over the longterm. We have been more transparent about our publications-related finances and transition to a sustainable Open Access future than any other Society or Commercial Publisher globally and are committed to maintaining that level of transparency in the future. If you're interested in reading more about ACM's Publication Finances, please have a look at https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess and scroll down to read the annual Publications Finances articles we publish in our flagship magazine.

Not everyone agrees with ACM's approach to the transition, but most of our participating ACM Open members support our model and have told us (and others publicly) that our approach is the most transparent and fair one out there, even if it presents some challenges for our institutional partners....and our approach to Author Rights is no exception to this. For those not familiar with ACM and to put this post in some context for what we are focused on at ACM, we publish ~28,000 research articles annually and over 50% of these are published on an OA basis from day 1 as a result of the corresponding authors being affiliated with an ACM Open institution. Approximately 1,400 institutions around the world have signed on to multi-year ACM Open licenses representing approximately $11.5M in annual income out of the $23M ACM generates from the sales of the ACM Digital Library (including ACM Open) and out of the $27M ACM in annual publishing expenses to maintain and grow ACM's Publications annually. The remaining $4M in sales come from some advertising through a job board, licensing content to aggregators like Ebsco, selling books, and a few other channels. We publish over 50,000 unique authors annually in our 70+ journals, 450 peer reviewed conference proceedings, and 7 technical magazines. We launched our hybrid Open Access program in April 2013 and after years of watching approximately 5% of our authors opting in to pay an APC to make their article Open Access (with a Creative Commons license option), ACM launched the ACM Open institutional Read + Publish model in January 2020 with the intention to transition to 100% Open Access. In June 2020, we publicly announced our goal of flipping to 100% Open Access by the end of 2025...."