ACM Transitions to Full Open Access
51 comments
·July 29, 2025lsuresh
kragen
Many USENIX papers are not open access, despite being available by literally just clicking the PDF from the conference website. (See the definition in https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration.) This is not for any nefarious reason; a lot of them predate the general understanding of why open-access licensing was important, as well as Creative Commons's founding.
You'll note, for example, that https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... bears no license of any kind, and the unfortunate fact is that under current copyright law is that random people redistributing copies of the paper is by default illegal.
riedel
I am currently the publication chair of a ACM SIGCHI conference and actually all the work is managed by by Sheridan publishing for ACM. The process is really streamlined. The main paper track actually is now a journal since a few years, so it is mostly getting the flea circus of 30 workshops and other adjunct papers to meet their deadlines. We are still under the old syste, so I wonder what the effect of the new system will be as some universities prepay the fees, while others require the authors to do that per paper afaik.
omichaelis
Your work played an influential part in my (brief) academic journey. Didn't think I would read your username here lol, thank you so much!
lsuresh
This made my day. Thank you for the kind words! What were you working on?
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raphaelmo
These are tremendous gold open access fees, consistent with for-profit editors... I much prefer the LIPIcs system ( https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/series/LIPIcs ), which is a public service supported by Germany. They even have a modern and useful interface to submit the papers to editors!
rezmason
Holy smoke!! I have so many old documents to read now.
Does anyone want to form an ACM Cool Papers Club?
bsenftner
At some point, a professor was retiring, and he had about 200 issues printed of the "ACM Transactions on Graphics", an entire book shelf. I asked and got it. The years he had were the 70's and 80's, when 3D graphics were research and transitioned from "how to render a line" to "stochastic motion blurred hyper-surface photon tracing". I used to read them as entertainment. Amazing stuff.
indy
Here is a great list of papers that was curated by Brett Victor: https://worrydream.com/refs/by-date.html
justincormack
Everything older than about 20 years has been open access for some time so you should have started earlier!
jazzypants
I'm totally down for that. Maybe a discord server or something?
bestham
I’m for a Awesome ACM in the style of the original https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
tempfile
What an irony to celebrate open access on discord!
OJFord
Chat for free, but some private channels & access to the weekly discussion call require Server Nitro 3000+
selfhoster11
Count me in
shortrounddev2
I just started reading this one https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/325165.325171
kragen
I've greatly appreciated the ACM's movements toward open access, but I have to ask:
What's the license?
The Berlin Declaration that defined Open Access https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration defines it as follows:
> 1. Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
> 2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability [sic], and long-term archiving.
This page is all about #2. What's #1?
I'm delighted to be able to read and share the classic CACM articles that have shaped the history of informatics, thanks to the ACM's policy changes over the last few years. The other day, for example, I was reading Liskov's paper on CLU in which she introduces the abstract data type: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800233.807045
But, as far as I can tell, neither that web page nor the PDF linked from it has a license granting "a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose." So, if I post it on my personal web site, or upload it to WikiSource or the Internet Archive, I'm still at risk of copyright lawsuits. And until I can do that, I only have access to the paper as long as CloudFlare thinks I'm human.
That's the problem Open Access is designed to solve.
yig
New articles are Creative Commons (CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND).
westurner
CC BY 4.0: Attribution 4.0 International: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
kragen
The new articles aren't important.
The ACM is probably never again going to publish a paper as influential as Liskov's paper I mentioned above, or Knuth's "Structured Programming With go to Statements", or "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362929.362947, or Schorre's "META-II: A Syntax-Oriented Compiler Writing Language" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800257.808896, or Ken Thompson's "Regular Expression Search Algorithm" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363347.363387, or Dan Ingalls on "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762.
Papers like those are the ones that we need to protect our ability to archive and distribute. Not David Geerts's "The Transformative Power of Inspiration" from the current issue of CACM https://cacm.acm.org/careers/the-transformative-power-of-ins.... (I am not making this up.) Thompson was competing with, let's say, Mooers and Schorre; Geerts has decided instead to compete with Jesus, the Buddha, and Norman Vincent Peale, and my brief reading of the article does not offer much hope for his prospects.
It seems safe to say that in 30 or 100 years' time nobody will cite Geerts's article as a turning point in the human understanding of inspiration, so if it's lost due to copyright restrictions, it probably won't matter that much.
At the other extreme, scholars seeking to understand the historical origins of object-orientation or personal computers would be crippled without access to material like Ingalls's paper. I'm not speculating—I'm speaking from experience, because lacking that access, I grew up thinking C++ was object-oriented!
But what do we see on the current version of the Ingalls paper that the ACM's web server just gave me? A note added in 02002 prohibiting public archival and redistribution:
> Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work or personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
westurner
> probably never again going to publish
Does this mean that ScholarlyArticles that authors choose to publish with ACM can be uploaded to e.g. ArXiv in full instead of only the preprints?
(If you upload PostScript and PDF to ArXiv, they can generate an HTML5 rendering of the article.)
Open access > Effects on scholarly publishing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
I learned OO from lots of great resources, and may have been disadvantaged to have have never read Ingall's paper; which isn't yet cited in Wikipedia's OO page under History.
Object orientated programinng > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming#Hi...
"'Considered harmful' considered harmful"
Considered harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
Edsger Dijkstra published "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" (1998) with CACM.
bpt3
Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth...
And to claim that new articles aren't important or that the ACM will never publish a highly impactful paper again is absurd.
Enjoy your free access to a wealth of human knowledge you played no part in creating, rather than waving a meaningless declaration around demanding more for nothing and demeaning individual authors.
subharmonicon
Cancelled my membership many years ago over their refusal to support open access.
YesThatTom2
Time to resubscribe! Show your support for this change with your wallet!
throwaway81523
> Institutions subscribing to ACM Open receive full access to the Premium version of the ACM Digital Library, providing their users with unrestricted access to over 800,000 ACM published research articles, the ACM Guide to Computing Literature (which indexes more than 6,500 3rd party publishers with direct links to the content), advanced tools, and exclusive features.
What does this mean? The 800,000 previously published articles will stay paywalled and only the new stuff will be open? Or will stuff be open to individuals while institutions have to keep paying? Or what?
Mathnerd314
So all articles will be open and free to read. The ACM Open subscription mainly includes publishing at a lower overall cost than the per-article rates, but also includes "AI-assisted search, bulk downloads, and citation management" and "article usage metrics, citation trends, and Altmetric tracking".
bubblethink
With publishing prices ranging from $700 to $1800. Some real art of the deal stuff here.
nautilius
What’s more, it creates an incentive to accept more papers for publication, with obvious implications for quality.
alwahi
what I'm seeing is that profs in the gulf countries are collaborating with profs and groups in third world countries where they are throwing money at the profs in the third world, who are doing all the work but don't have the funds to get published in these "prestigious journals"(its called the third world for a reason), so all these people get authorship for free.
rs186
It has always worked like that.
bubblethink
This is just shifting the cost from the readers to the writers. It doesn't make it any better as the prices are completely out of touch with reality. Note that this is not the cost for registering at a conference; that is separate. This is just the publishing fee for each paper.
clueless
in an open access world, who should be paying the people who are reviewing the papers (which cost time/money)?
atrus
It's not really shifting the cost from readers to writers, since these fee existed beforehand though. They just went from double-dipping to single dipping.
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aoki
ACM went hybrid access (optional APC for Gold open access) in 2013. Before that, there were no APCs. As of 2026 authors will pay APC unless their institution pays (by subscribing, or directly). If you are in a developed country and not affiliated with a subscriber institution, there is no longer a free-to-publish option.
PaulHoule
Yeah! It’s been a long time coming.
humblechan
[dead]
USENIX and their conferences were the absolute best to publish with. You as a researcher focus on submitting papers and/or being part of the PC. They help organize the whole conference instead of depending on an army of volunteers (you won't see "general chairs" and "local chairs" unlike with ACM). And all papers were open access without even needing a login: you literally just click the PDF from the conference website.