Discussed extensively two weeks ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991</a> (243 comments)
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:<p>Corporate <a href="https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/corporate-pricing" rel="nofollow">https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/corporate-pri...</a><p>Government <a href="https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/government/dl-pricing" rel="nofollow">https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/government/dl...</a><p>Academic Institutions <a href="https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen" rel="nofollow">https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen</a><p>Individuals <a href="https://dl.acm.org/action/publisherEcommerceHelper?doi=10.5555/premium-edition&redirectUri=https://dl.acm.org/" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/action/publisherEcommerceHelper?doi=10.55...</a><p>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 <a href="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55017806873_c9ba2490c1_b.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55017806873_c9ba2490c1_b...</a>
While it is free for readers, authors or author institutions still need to pay to publish the papers.<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://cc.acm.org/2026/open-access/" rel="nofollow">https://cc.acm.org/2026/open-access/</a>
Given the current trends in publishing "productivity" that may not be a bad thing.
Is that … a bad thing? I know that peer reviewing takes time (although iirc journals don’t pay reviewers). And there is overhead around publishing which needs to be covered somehow.
Academic publishing is _notoriously_ profitable. Authorship and the bulk of the editorial process is done by others for free, and these days you often aren't even creating a physical copy. Their overheads are really pretty minimal. What the money (subscriptions and / or APCs) gets is the kudos associated with the publication.<p>It is reasonable to say: well if they aren't providing anything of value then the market ought to bypass them. The reality is that the publishers have been very canny in protecting their position, and sharp practice is rife.
They charge a substantial premium for that service. The open access publication fees are typically hundreds or even thousands of dollars per article.<p>There are other platforms that can offer a similar service for much cheaper, but scientists incentivised to publish on established journals that have a higher impact metrics.
Very bad. APC fees typically are much larger than overhead of publishing and publishers have extreme profit margins.
Let's do a "best of" ACM, to list everyone's favorite articles.<p>First thing that comes to mind for me are the series of articles presented at HOPL conferences, History of Programming Languages.<p>HOPL II (1993) <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766</a><p>HOPL III (2007) <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844</a><p>HOPL IV (2021) <a href="https://dl.acm.org/do/10.1145/event-12215/abs/" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/do/10.1145/event-12215/abs/</a>
I love that I can now just drop the link to this gem:<p><a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165555.1165556" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165555.1165556</a><p>Aggregability is NP-Hard... Useful the next time someone insists that it's possible to find a "perfect" model for a non-trivial ML problem. (I get this ask 1-2 times per month.)
Where is HOPL I?
Could only find this: <a href="https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8</a>
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.
> 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<p>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.
I was in academia for only a few years. I did a lot of reviewing (one of the chores for graduate students). I don't know what to say, here; there needs to be an economically based gate keeper for publication & review. Otherwise you'll get spammed by <i>hundreds</i> (per graduate student) of crazy-people papers. I was in a niche PL subfield (generic programming in the mid-2000s), and there was this one guy I called "guitar dude" that kept submitting PL papers using "guitar theory". The basis of the theory was an "algorithm" he developed to determine if a number was prime in O(1) (constant!!?) time in the size of the number. He was by <i>far</i> the most determined; he had a "swap" scam he ran to get his papers in. OTOH, submissions to the editor (my PI) numbered in the THOUSANDS, and we only had, like, 35 attendees at GPCE? I can't imagine what Nature or Science have to deal with.<p>I don't know how submission works for non-Western subsidized countries; but, just wading through the pre-<i>AI</i> submission process was a 50+-hour a week job for one, tiny, niche conference. Making the cost $1000 cuts that down by at least 2 orders of magnitude.<p>On the flip side ... paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea? Reviewers need to be skeptical AF. Even the <i>best</i> scientists can throw out turds every now and then.
Great news. They temporarily opened it in 2020 during the pandemic. I argued it should remain so in a post: <a href="https://www.scott-a-s.com/acm-digital-library-should-remain-open" rel="nofollow">https://www.scott-a-s.com/acm-digital-library-should-remain-...</a>. I'm glad it's finally happened.
Available to read is <i>not</i> 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.
For anyone else wondering what the definition in Budapest Open Access Initiative is:<p>> By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself<p><a href="https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/" rel="nofollow">https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/</a>
More fodder for LLMs? I don't think humans are going to directly consume all that text.
Finally. This might have a material impact on improving professional standards in the industry.<p>Here’s the actual link to content <a href="https://dl.acm.org/" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/</a>
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:<p>Always provide a DOI-style link, for example: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1088/0029-5515/30/2/001" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1088/0029-5515/30/2/001</a><p>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.
This is a great start, but it is not enough.<p>We need to keep pushing for other journals, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, to be open access and free for all.
IEEE may do it, as it's a professional organization. That is, they're a non-profit dedicated to the furtherance of the field. Being open access fits their mission, and the costs can be handled by dues and fees. Springer and Elsevier are for-profit publishers. I don't know how if they can have an open-access business model.
I'm not sure "open access" in this context actually means, err, that the access is actually open.
and at the same time paywalled metadata <a href="https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-open-access" rel="nofollow">https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-o...</a>
This is lame, but always remember that OpenAlex exists and is completely free:<p><a href="https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.source.publisher_lineage:p4310319798,publication_year:2025" rel="nofollow">https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.so...</a>
Kudos. I wonder how long it took to 1) decide this move, 2) actually migrate their system
This is great news and really makes me want to submit to ACM over IEEE.
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