ACM Is Now Open Access (acm.org)

and at the same time paywalled metadata https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-o...

This is great news and really makes me want to submit to ACM over IEEE.

> ACM will become one of the very few organizations to offer a large, integrated, and highly curated library of articles and related artifacts openly accessible to all

Is there anything specific about them doing that? Most of the publishers are now moving to open access model (where they charge authors thousands and still not paying for reviewers) so not sure about their claim here.

While it is free for readers, authors or author institutions still need to pay to publish the papers.

> Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

https://cc.acm.org/2026/open-access/

This is a great start, but it is not enough.

We need to keep pushing for other journals, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, to be open access and free for all.

This is good, but they're now charging authors a publishing fee of over $1000 per article (and they say that that is the discounted price). It is unclear whether this is justified. In my experience publishing scientific articles with ACM, all the real work (such as peer review) is done by volunteers. From what I can tell, ACM just hosts the exact PDF + metadata that authors supply. I suspect that in the future, more journals and conferences will switch to an arXiv-overlay model.

Finally. This might have a material impact on improving professional standards in the industry.

Here’s the actual link to content https://dl.acm.org/

More fodder for LLMs? I don't think humans are going to directly consume all that text.

Great news. They temporarily opened it in 2020 during the pandemic. I argued it should remain so in a post: https://www.scott-a-s.com/acm-digital-library-should-remain-.... I'm glad it's finally happened.

As noted above, 'Fully Open Access' does not mean completely free. So, while this change is welcome, there are still a lot of pricing/licensing options:

Corporate https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/corporate-pri...

Government https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/government/dl...

Academic Institutions https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen

Individuals https://dl.acm.org/action/publisherEcommerceHelper?doi=10.55...

Also, the 'Basic Edition' provided for free to individuals without institutional/individual accounts, the ACM explains, does not include niceties such as 'Advanced Search' (e.g., filters), which requires an upgrade https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55017806873_c9ba2490c1_b...

Kudos. I wonder how long it took to 1) decide this move, 2) actually migrate their system

Discussed extensively two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991 (243 comments)

Let's do a "best of" ACM, to list everyone's favorite articles.

First thing that comes to mind for me are the series of articles presented at HOPL conferences, History of Programming Languages.

HOPL II (1993) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766

HOPL III (2007) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844

HOPL IV (2021) https://dl.acm.org/do/10.1145/event-12215/abs/

Imagine a world where you can click on references in your paper and have them immediately come up, like the rest of the web. This can be done today:

Always provide a DOI-style link, for example: https://doi.org/10.1088/0029-5515/30/2/001

These can be easily changed to actual working links with a simple browser substitution rule: replace the "doi.org" with "sci-hub.se" or whatever.

Available to read is not open access. Sadly publishers have completely subverted the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access. It's about rights, not allowed to read the text.

[dead]