ACM Transitions to Full Open Access
acm.org

・

391 points

・

pcvarmint

・

3 days ago

61 comments

lsuresh ・ 3 days ago

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.

  • kragen ・ 2 days ago

    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.

    • lsuresh ・ 2 days ago

      It's the first time I'm hearing about the Berlin Declaration. :)

      • kragen ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        Perhaps the first time you'd heard of it directly, but you used the term "open access" as if everyone were familiar with it, so you'd apparently been hearing about it indirectly for many years.

        • bpt3 ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          It's almost like that declaration doesn't have the impact you seem to think it does.

          Open access means just that to most people, not free reign to do whatever you like with the content as the hosting piece isn't all that relevant.

          • kragen ・ a day ago

            The impact of that declaration is that people today are talking about "open access" and moving to open-access publishing models, and new ACM articles are being published as CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND.

            Most people don't have any idea what we're talking about; if you asked most people what Kosaraju's algorithm was, how an absorption refrigerator worked, or who the Four Hundred were in the Gilded Age, they also wouldn't have anything sensible to say. In https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9 they found that less than half of college students in the USA knew the name of the capital of Iraq, which was currently full of US troops. And in https://youtu.be/ZjGd1F1Xk8w?t=18 you can see lots of random people who don't know what "WWW" stands for and think Asia is a country.

            Talking about "open access" without knowing about the Berlin Declaration at the heart of that movement is the same kind of ignorance.

  • riedel ・ 2 days ago

    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 ・ 3 days ago

    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 ・ 2 days ago

      This made my day. Thank you for the kind words! What were you working on?

raphaelmo ・ 3 days ago

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 ・ 3 days ago

Holy smoke!! I have so many old documents to read now.

Does anyone want to form an ACM Cool Papers Club?

  • bsenftner ・ 2 days ago

    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.

  • jazzypants ・ 3 days ago

    I'm totally down for that. Maybe a discord server or something?

    • tempfile ・ 3 days ago

      What an irony to celebrate open access on discord!

      • OJFord ・ 2 days ago

        Chat for free, but some private channels & access to the weekly discussion call require Server Nitro 3000+

      • Timwi ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Can recommend some alternatives?

        • tempfile ・ a day ago

          Discourse, mastodon, email... there are probably plenty of options. It's more missing a leader than it is missing a platform.

kragen ・ 3 days ago

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 ・ 3 days ago

    New articles are Creative Commons (CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND).

    • kragen ・ 3 days ago

      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 ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        > 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.

        • kragen ・ a day ago

          Anyone can upload a CC-BY article in full to anywhere, and anyone can upload a CC-BY-NC-ND article to anywhere noncommercial. ArXiv only accepts uploads from authors, though.

          The "history" section of the Wikipedia article cites Kay's excellent "Early History of Smalltalk" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/155360.155364 which of course does cite Ingalls's 01978 POPL paper, as well as 17 other papers published by the ACM, by my count, more than any other single publisher except Xerox. That section also highlights the ACM conference OOPSLA and cites Borning's "Thinglab", published at OOPSLA. So access to historical ACM papers is extremely important for understanding the history of object-orientation.

      • bpt3 ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 8 more

        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.

        • kragen ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 7 more

          Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have.

          I'm not demanding that the ACM do more. I'm demanding that they do less, by renouncing their right to sue other people for legally archive and redistribute ACM papers, so the ACM don't bear the full responsibility of doing so themselves. That way, I can do more of that wealth-of-knowledge-creating stuff you're so excited about, benefiting the ACM's members. It's a win-win.

          It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing. That affects how we write literally every line of code in every language today except maybe assembly. Maybe one of the LLM papers might compete?

          On a different note, it seems like you mostly post comments on HN in order to personally attack other commenters, as you are doing here, and to advocate political positions. That isn't what the site is for. If you keep doing it, they're going to ban you.

          • newswasboring ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            > It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing.

            Ok, disclaimer that I am not a computer scientist (work in semiconductors so only tangentially related). But, this statement has the same "end of history" energy has the famous Philipp von Jolly quote about end of theoretical physics:

            "In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."

            I'm not claiming you are saying its end of CS, just the claim that there cannot be a new paradigm discovered in CS doesn't sit right with me.

            • kragen ・ 2 days ago

              I think there's an enormous amount that can still be discovered, including new paradigms. I don't agree with Ken Thompson's opinion that people studying informatics today are unlucky because the most interesting stuff is already done.

              But I don't think it's especially controversial to claim that Galileo and Newton had more of an impact on physics than Maxwell and Einstein or than anyone since. You could maybe quibble about Gauss and Lagrange, but Kip Thorne and Ed Witten are much more similar to Galileo than Galileo was to Descartes or Aristotle.

              You might be able to cause an Einstein-like revolution in informatics—LLMs in particular seem like they have a good chance of doing that. But the field those new paradigms revolutionize will probably be recognizably the field that was largely defined by papers published in CACM in the 60s and 70s.

              Also, although this isn't relevant to my thesis that probably nobody will publish such an impactful paper again, the ACM is especially unlikely to. "Attention is All You Need" https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3... got published in NIPS 2017 rather than CACM or even an ACM conference. You could imagine a timeline where CACM was the Cell or Lancet of informatics and published papers like AiAYN instead of "The Transformative Power of Inspiration". But that's not the one we're in.

          • bpt3 ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            > Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have.

            You (and I) are free to publish in venues that meet our requirements.

            > I'm not demanding that the ACM do more. I'm demanding that they do less, by renouncing their right to sue other people for legally archive and redistribute ACM papers, so the ACM don't bear the full responsibility of doing so themselves. That way, I can do more of that wealth-of-knowledge-creating stuff you're so excited about, benefiting the ACM's members. It's a win-win.

            I am not at all worried about this, and there's no real reason for you to be either (the odds of the ACM library vanishing is almost 0), so it seems like you're being needlessly hostile.

            > It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing. That affects how we write literally every line of code in every language today except maybe assembly. Maybe one of the LLM papers might compete?

            I'm sorry, but this is absurd. "Attention is all you need" comes to mind as a recent example of a highly impactful paper (not published in an ACM venue, but you're now expanding your claim to the entire field of CS).

            > On a different note, it seems like you mostly post comments on HN in order to personally attack other commenters, as you are doing here, and to advocate political positions. That isn't what the site is for. If you keep doing it, they're going to ban you.

            You're a real peach.

            • kragen ・ a day ago

              The odds of the ACM library vanishing are the same as the odds that you, personally, are going to die: at least 1000:1 in favor.† The only question is whether it happens before the relevant copyrights expire. Anyone who can't convince CloudFlare they're human has already lost access to the ACM library.

              I've already addressed your "You are free to publish" argument.

              I'm being hostile because your comment, in addition to being factually incorrect in a way that demonstrates your complete unfamiliarity with the subject matter, consisted almost entirely of personal attacks on me. You accused me of "looking a gift horse in the mouth", of playing "no part" in "creating" "human knowledge", and "demanding more for nothing". Now you're implying you thought that was friendly rhetoric? Do you expect anyone to believe that? How stupid do you think other people are?

              I already gave "Attention is all you need" as a recent example of a possibly highly impactful paper in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734480. The fact that it wasn't published in an ACM venue is one of the reasons that the ACM's policy on new papers is relatively inconsequential compared to their policy on existing papers.

              ______

              † I'd say 1:0 in favor, but rationally speaking, we can't completely exclude the possibility that all of this is some sort of hallucination or simulation, or that time will stop tomorrow so that everything that exists at that time will never vanish, and so on. But, under the usual presumptions that the universe is objectively real and everything in it vanishes sooner or later, the ACM Digital Library is absolutely guaranteed to vanish. And if you think it's inconceivable that it will be destroyed by political machinations within a few years, did you predict two years ago that the US would vote in favor of Russia invading Ukraine in the UN?

          • DonHopkins ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            "Attention Considered Harmful"

            "GOTO Is All You Need"

            • kragen ・ 2 days ago

              That last one sounds like Scheme. Or Levien's Io.

              The former sounds like a LessWrong fanfic.

bubblethink ・ 3 days ago

With publishing prices ranging from $700 to $1800. Some real art of the deal stuff here.

  • rs186 ・ 3 days ago

    It has always worked like that.

    • bubblethink ・ 3 days ago

      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.

      • atrus ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        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.

        • bubblethink ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          The open access pricing is different and higher than the old closed access pricing. That is the switch in all open access publishing. In any case, both the old prices and new ones are absurdly high.

          • aoki ・ 3 days ago

            The pricing is not about the cost of storing and serving the articles. It is partly direct revenue replacement and partly “stick” to get institutions to subscribe to APC allowance buckets.

      • clueless ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        in an open access world, who should be paying the people who are reviewing the papers (which cost time/money)?

        • bubblethink ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Reviewers aren't paid. This is just money for ACM, the non profit.

          • clueless ・ a day ago

            ah in that case, this is long over due.

    • aoki ・ 3 days ago

      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.

  • nautilius ・ 3 days ago

    What’s more, it creates an incentive to accept more papers for publication, with obvious implications for quality.

    • alwahi ・ 2 days ago

      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.

subharmonicon ・ 3 days ago

Cancelled my membership many years ago over their refusal to support open access.

  • YesThatTom2 ・ 2 days ago

    Time to resubscribe! Show your support for this change with your wallet!

throwaway81523 ・ 3 days ago

> 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 ・ 3 days ago

    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".

PaulHoule ・ 3 days ago

Yeah! It’s been a long time coming.

  • musicale ・ 2 days ago

    Seems like ACM has finally caught up with where USENIX has been for years.

    Though I'm not a fan of charging exorbitant open access fees. Arxiv charges exactly how much?

    Still waiting for IEEE though.