[HN Gopher] ACM Is Now Open Access
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ACM Is Now Open Access
Author : leglock
Score : 302 points
Date : 2026-01-01 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.acm.org)
| SkySkimmer wrote:
| and at the same time paywalled metadata
| https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-o...
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| This is lame, but always remember that OpenAlex exists and is
| completely free:
|
| https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.so...
| ModernMech wrote:
| This is great news and really makes me want to submit to ACM over
| IEEE.
| rgreekguy wrote:
| They are both hosted on the same platform, which is owned by
| John Wiley & Sons.
| ModernMech wrote:
| But IEEE is not open access entirely now too, right? Or am I
| misunderstanding?
| elashri wrote:
| > 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.
| thechao wrote:
| 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 _hundreds_ (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 _far_ 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.
|
| I don't know how submission works for non-Western subsidized
| countries; but, just wading through the pre- _AI_ 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.
|
| On the flip side ... paying the reviewers just seems like a bad
| idea? Reviewers need to be skeptical AF. Even the _best_
| scientists can throw out turds every now and then.
| lmc wrote:
| > paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea? Reviewers
| need to be skeptical AF
|
| Sorry, it's not obvious to me - how might payment for
| reviewers affect their decision making?
| thechao wrote:
| Let's be real: graduate students are not paid well. Even a
| modest payment scheme would be a dramatic boost in their
| income. What payment schedule would you use for review? By
| paper? By journal? If it's "by paper" then the students
| will be motivated to churn through the papers to get paid.
| I'm not sure what the incentive structure is there, but it
| doesn't sound right.
|
| I guess the journals could turn around and pay the PI? But,
| then what? The "reviewers" still aren't being paid; just
| the PI? The incentive then is for the PI to have as many
| grad students as possible just reviewing papers. (FREE.
| MONEY.) If there was ever a dynamic I've been in where one
| agent doesn't need MORE power, it's the PI-grad-student
| one.
|
| And, I've not even considered (in depth) the Bad Actors(tm)
| in such a situation. I'm just thinking about basic humans
| humaning along...
| lmc wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the reply. I wasn't aware grad
| students were so heavily involved in the review process,
| thought it was more postdocs.
| thechao wrote:
| PostDocs review the review. PI's sign off on PD's to make
| sure they're not idiots. Only big labs have enough PD's
| to let them do reviews. And, for sure, in CS there's
| almost _no_ big labs. I was under Bjarne Stroustrup, and
| the larger umbrella group was probably 40ish staff, in
| total. That 'd be: 3 lead PIs (Bjarne, Nancy, Lawrence);
| there were a small core of assistant profs (Jaakko, Gabi,
| etc. -- maybe 4 or 5 of them?) There were _no_ PD 's:
| just 25ish grad students, and then a rotating stable of
| undergrads. We were _extremely_ well funded (JP Morgan,
| MSFT, the fed).
|
| Our "sister" lab over in computational biology had a few
| PD's, but was 2x as big, and had easily 5x the funding.
| lmc wrote:
| Cool, thanks for the perspective.
| vinni2 wrote:
| 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/
| random3 wrote:
| Given the current trends in publishing "productivity" that may
| not be a bad thing.
| pm90 wrote:
| 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.
| shellac wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| azan_ wrote:
| Very bad. APC fees typically are much larger than overhead of
| publishing and publishers have extreme profit margins.
| ufo wrote:
| They charge a substantial premium for that service. The open
| access publication fees are typically hundreds or even
| thousands of dollars per article.
|
| 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.
| colesantiago wrote:
| 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.
| logifail wrote:
| I'm not sure "open access" in this context actually means, err,
| that the access is actually open.
| emil-lp wrote:
| What do you mean? Open access means exactly what it says.
| scott_s wrote:
| 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.
| jules wrote:
| 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.
| ghshephard wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the primary purpose of the $1000 is just to
| create some small gate to avoid overloading reviewers/ACM.
| There are probably other mechanisms that could be used - such
| as having "recommendations" for from already approved
| researchers - I think arXiv has something like that.
| jules wrote:
| That isn't the case. Conferences organize their own website
| to submit articles for review. Volunteers from the conference
| pre-filter submitted articles for spam, the rest is handled
| by the review committee. There is no cost to submit. In fact,
| the eventual cost is often not even mentioned at that point.
| When the article is accepted for publication, the conference
| gives authors a link to an ACM website where the authors
| upload their PDFs. Only after that will the authors be asked
| to pay the fee (and if you wanted, you could refuse at that
| point, which presumably means that the conference will eat
| the loss, or maybe they'll un-publish your article).
|
| I don't think spam is a huge issue. The conference websites
| and submission portals are niche and random people don't tend
| to find them or care enough to go through the trouble.
| ufo wrote:
| Not at all; the charge happens at the end of the proccess,
| after the article was reviewed and accepted for publication.
|
| They charge that much because they can.
| raphman wrote:
| I have volunteered in various roles for ACM conferences and
| thus have some insight into ACM's path towards Open Access over
| the past years.
|
| Just a few things to consider:
|
| - ACM is not a for-profit publisher like Springer or Elsevier.
| Any profits made from their/our publishing activities subsidize
| e.g., outreach activities, travel stipends for developing
| countries, and potential losses from e.g. conferences. - In my
| experience, ACM is one of the very few publishers in computer
| science where you can generally trust the published papers. -
| Keeping a long-term digital library is not just "putting PDFs
| on a server" but involves a lot of additional costs. The ACM HQ
| is rather lean IMHO, but there are multiple people involved in
| developing the Digital Library, handling cases of copyright
| infringement and plagiarism, supporting volunteers, etc. Also,
| the ACM DL contains a rising number of video recordings of
| conference talks, etc. Additionally, there are several
| contractors to be paid. For example, authors no longer generate
| their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a
| central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an
| Indian company, Aptara. - In the past, subscriptions to the ACM
| Digital Library were a major, stable source of income for ACM.
| ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by
| giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently
| stable alternative income sources.
| rssoconnor wrote:
| How does the arXiv manage the same feat for one tenth the
| cost?
| riazrizvi wrote:
| 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/
| zkmon wrote:
| More fodder for LLMs? I don't think humans are going to directly
| consume all that text.
| pm90 wrote:
| Most researchers publish their papers to arxiv anyway which
| LLMs can freely access.
| tokai wrote:
| Don't they already train on the shadow libraries?
| scott_s wrote:
| 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.
| theodpHN wrote:
| 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...
| layer8 wrote:
| Someone will probably build an external search index.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Kudos. I wonder how long it took to 1) decide this move, 2)
| actually migrate their system
| macintux wrote:
| Discussed extensively two weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991 (243 comments)
| lioeters wrote:
| 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/
| chaboud wrote:
| I love that I can now just drop the link to this gem:
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165555.1165556
|
| 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.)
| kensai wrote:
| Where is HOPL I? Could only find this:
| https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8
| leoc wrote:
| The HOPL (1) book (ISBN 9780127450407 ) is at
| https://doi.org/10.1145/800025 (direct link to ACM:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025 ) .
| leoc wrote:
| (As others have said, it's probably better to choose the
| doi.org URL over the dl.acm.org one in general. Three cheers
| for HOPL!)
| jhallenworld wrote:
| 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.
| tokai wrote:
| 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.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| For anyone else wondering what the definition in Budapest Open
| Access Initiative is:
|
| > 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
|
| https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/
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(page generated 2026-01-01 23:01 UTC)