Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access

Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are the ones that generally do not get paid for their work.

Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money).

Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.

> Just 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...

While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.

I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.

> 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).

We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades.

It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.

It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.

I 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.

Open 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.

The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen quantity over quality.

Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.

Didn'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.

As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees.

For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.

Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.

Surprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)

How do independent researchers, doing research after hours, in the evening or the weekend, finance this?

So 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/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.

I 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.

Thats weird. Fine from China (wonder what host they are using)

I don't think old publications will become open access, only new ones.

> 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.

Same 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 :)