Panlab: Brewing IDEAS

pan wrote:acm's new open access model https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess

Open Access Publication & ACM

We are excited to announce that Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication. This means that more than six decades of CACM’s renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library.

But why this change, and why now? For almost 65 years, the contents of CACM have been exclusively accessible to ACM members and individuals affiliated with institutions that subscribe to either CACM or the ACM Digital Library. In 2020, ACM announced its intention to transition to a fully Open Access publisher within a roughly five-year timeframe (January 2026) under a financially sustainable model. The transition is going well: By the end of 2023, approximately 40% of the ~26,000 articles ACM publishes annually were being published Open Access utilizing the ACM Open model. As ACM has progressed toward this goal, it has increasingly opened large parts of the ACM Digital Library, including more than 100,000 articles published between 1951–2000. It is ACM’s plan to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when the transition to full Open Access is complete.

As part of this transition and to coincide with the launch of CACM‘s new website, all CACM articles, past, present, and future, will be published in front of the subscription paywall.

By opening CACM to the world, ACM hopes to increase engagement with the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover its rich resources and the benefits of joining the largest professional computer science organization. This move will also benefit CACM authors by expanding their readership to a larger and more diverse audience. Of course, the community’s continued support of ACM through membership and the ACM Open model is essential to keeping ACM and CACM strong, so it is critical that current members continue their membership and authors encourage their institutions to join the ACM Open model to keep this effort sustainable.

We invite everyone to explore CACM’s vast collection of articles, columns, and news items on the new website. Thank you for your interest in ACM and CACM!

Open Access Publication & ACM

ACM Reiterates Its Intention to Transition to 100% Open Access Publication by 2026

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.