Open Access Publication & ACM

"On June 9, 2023 ACM's highest governing body, the ACM Council, was presented with, discussed, and showed wide-spread support for a plan to transition all ACM Publications to a sustainable Open Access model no later than the end of the 2025 calendar year. This timeline was originally agreed back in June 2020 when ACM's Council voted unanimously to adopt a five-year time line for this transition to occur in a financially sustainable way. The plan includes a multi-phased approach which relies heavily on the support of universities, government research institutes, and companies in the technology sector to participate in the ACM Open program.

In its simplest form, the model includes an annual "flat fee" paid by institutions affiliated with ACM authors to support the costs of publishing those papers in ACM's various journals, conference proceedings, and magazines and the costs of accessing those papers in the ACM Digital Library. The amount of the "flat fee" for a particular institution is based on the level of historical publication activity affiliated with that institution (as an accurate predictor of that institution's future publication activity in the current year) and on a "cost recovery" model to ensure that ACM has sufficient funds to support its industry leading publication program and online platform, the ACM Digital Library. Institutions whose faculty and students publish more with ACM and use the ACM Digital Library more heavily have a higher "flat fee" while institutions that publish and use the ACM Digital Library less have a lower "flat fee". Unlike many of the other Open Access models being implemented by competing societies or publishers, there are no additional fees to be paid by authors if they are affiliated with an ACM Open participating institution.

The main objective of the ACM Open model is to sustainably transition all ACM Publications to a 100% Open Access model to remove any and all barriers to accessing articles published by ACM in the ACM Digital Library. The computer science community has been pushing for ACM to do this for years, but the sub-text within that message is that the community cares deeply about the quality and value of ACM's Publications and the collection of over 700,000 full-text articles published in ACM's growing list of high-impact journals, top-tier conferences, and technology-focused magazines. The community wants these publication venues to thrive and grow, and the community has made it clear that it views Open Access as critical to that future success. Every year ACM submissions and the number of published articles grows and yet maintain consistently low acceptance rates typically ranging between 20-30% depending on the journal or conference venue. Moving too quickly to Open Access without a plan to cover ongoing publication costs is in neither ACM nor the community's best interest, so we've been working with the community to develop and implement a plan that moves us in the right direction. Progress with this plan has accelerated and over the past three years we've gone from less than 5% Open Access to approximately 35% Open Access today...."