Ok that's good but ... what exactly will be open accessed? Do they keep a lot of what is important or interesting? I really don't know right now. They should have also added the relevancy of that announcement; right now I just don't know what will all be opened, so I hope to find this information in the comments here.

Great news, and hopefully more to come across other publications! If only aaronsw was here to see it :(

Does this kind of general shift more firmly establish a marketplace and business model for eminent "peers" to more easily create independent journals? Universities increasingly price in this pay to publish model so groups of editors could very easily corner their respective niches with independent publications if they cooperate with one another. The market is ripe for fragmentation.

Maybe this is wishful thinking but a proliferation of openly accessible and competing independent publications could correct for a lot of the ills of the Goodhart effect in academic publishing. Market shifts that make this evolutionary pathway feasible and realistic are exiting.

There’s some nuance to this surrounding the “creative commons” licensing of these ACM publications.

Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).

Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.

Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:

“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”

This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.

#FreeAlanTuring

It's not immediately clear from reading this what this means for ACM books, both older ones and new ones. I'm a fan of a lot of their older books, such as the Turing Award Lecture anthology they published in the early 1990s. I'm also interested in some of the newer books they've published in the last several years (The tributes to Dijkstra and Hoare especially stand out). I really hope these are included as well.

The natural change from this are the journals with no cost of publication. There is no way that the added value of the journal is thousands of dollars, especially given that the referees work for free.

In astrophysics we already have a journal like that is gaining traction after several publishers switched to golden open access.

The system when the taxpayer subsidizes enormous profit margins of Elsevier etc while relying on free work by referees is crazy

Will it be retro-active? I stopped my ACM subscription after they broke their deal with access to O’Reilly platform. And if I want to access ACM in general I can use my wikpedia library credential I guess, but possibly there was things still unavailable through that partnership.

Perhaps a system where the University publishes papers written by its researchers, and nobody else. That way, there is gatekeeping in the form of the University not hiring researchers who are kooks or frauds. The University's incentive would be maintaining their reputation.

Is this going to include all of their back catalog? I’ve had a lot of free time lately and decided I’ve been missing the SIGPLAN proceedings and have b been procrastinating on reactivating my old membership to get them. I stopped when the paper version went away, which is ages ago now.

i dont even understand why these things exist...

just publish your stuff in a website... on a blog, on github....