For me it was that and their unqualified support of H-1B visas.The ACM always said it wanted to build bridges with practitioners but paywalled journals aren&#x27;t the way to do it.I would be 100% for more green cards or a better guestworker program of some kind, but I&#x27;ve seen so many good people on H-1Bs twisted into knots... Like the time the startup I was working for hired a new HR head and two weeks in treated an H-1B so bad the HR person quit. I wanted to tell this guy &quot;your skills are in demand and you could get a job across the street&quot; but that&#x27;s wasn&#x27;t true.I joined the IEEE Computer Society because it had a policy to not have a policy which I could accept.

Same for me, I sent emails about open access to the ACM circa 1995 when I was still a student. After a while I dropped my ACM subscription.It just took them 30 years :)

I think they probably have aggressive firewall with a lot of false positives. I live in Switzerland and got blocked but tried a VPN to US and it worked. Although it is usually that I get blocked for using VPN.But I&#x27;m not sure if it is about your IP or the whole country but I guess it the former. Who knows what the firewall god at Cloudflare does.

Thats weird. Fine from China (wonder what host they are using)

They block agressively. Not only based on IP adresses. If you visit the site with a privacy-focussed browser or in private mode they will also tell you your IP is blocked.

I get the Notice : &quot;Your IP Address has been blocked&quot;, i am from algeria by the way, not sure why my country is blocked.

They made most of their archive open access a few years ago.

No, there appears to be archives of past journals on the site.

I don&#x27;t think old publications will become open access, only new ones.

Give me a reading list! What are great publications in the ACM that one should read come January?

Surprising it is necessary, given no such fees for machine learning and associated areas. (Which are all not ACM.)

These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.

This is because of the fact that APC&#x27;s are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6&#x27;s price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also.Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamdb.info&#x2F;app&#x2F;2807960&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamdb.info&#x2F;app&#x2F;2807960&#x2F;</a>

Didn&#x27;t expect Brazil being off the &quot;List of Countries Qualifying for APC Waivers&quot;Knowing the reality of the Brazilian&#x27;s public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I&#x27;m pretty sure we won&#x27;t have articles from Brazil anymore.

Is it a fee for publication or a fee for reviewing?Found,&gt; Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).

The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee.For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.

The people that pay are the Institutions (Universities mainly). Not the readers. The publications are sold to them as bundles even if the Institution does not want all the journals.

It still wouldn&#x27;t be perfect, but I&#x27;d like to see a system that rewarded publishers and authors for coming up with work that was a load bearing citation for other work (by different authors on different publishers, i.e. ones with no ulterior motive for having chosen it as a source).Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.

I disagree. We haven&#x27;t chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I think these new incentives are exactly what we want:1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their &quot;prestige&quot; factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.

&gt; Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers.That&#x27;s the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.

Disagree. The journals are now acting like a paid certification. If they admit any old slop, who would pay to submit their papers?The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions.Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?

What about a better deal: Scientific knowledge shouldn&#x27;t be a for-profit venture to pursue.

The whole publication model is broken, not just the incentives. It used to be researchers eager to share their new findings with the few hundred people that could understand them, now it&#x27;s throngs of PhD students grinding their way to degrees and postdocs trying to secure tenure. The journals are flooded with nonsense and actual researchers resort to word of mouth point out valuable papers to each other.

&gt; Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papersPublishers have a finite capacity based on the number of credible peer reviewers. In the past, it felt very exploitative as an academic doing peer review for the economic benefit of publishing houses. I&#x27;d much rather have &quot;public good&quot; publishers with open access -- at least I feel like the &quot;free&quot; labor is aligned with the desired outcome.

You had the quantity argument as well when it was about accumulation of subscribers. As a bigger variety of content also attracts a bigger variety of people.

Processing != Publishing (at least I hope not).

The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen quantity over quality.Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s a good price to pay for the reward.

This is quite a good thing, as you will no longer have to buy all the research papers to advance your own research.The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you finance that or choose to publish in another journal.

Some journals support “green open access”, where you can share your article minus the journal’s formatting on open repositories etc, sometimes some time after publication, which is usually free. I can’t see any mention of this from the ACM though

Most reputable journals will waive the fees in this case, though the easier route if you are in a rich country where this is less likely is to partner with an institution. They get to add to their research output stats and you get your funding, a win win.

I don&#x27;t, I publish directly on Wikiversity. There it&#x27;s available to read, use and edit by every follow human with an internet connection. Those willing to contribute with feedback can do so through discussion pages.

You don&#x27;t :( You look for alternatives. You get discriminated based on wealth

How do independent researchers, doing research after hours, in the evening or the  weekend, finance this?

This is on purpose, the industry was forged by someone explicitly trying to get rich off of a public resource. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;mz&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;part-one-robert-maxwell-how-ghislaine-maxwells-dad&#x2F;id1373812661?i=1000706496292" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;mz&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;part-one-robert-maxwel...</a>

Are you talking only about conference papers? What about those submitted to Nature, Science, etc.?And who will curate the best research, especially for people outside your field? I can&#x27;t follow the discussion in every field.

Agreed. Also the claims that the fees are for typesetting and the like are highly suspect, given how specific so many journals&#x27; formatting requirements are. As poster above says, if they were spending any significant amount of money on typesetting and the like, you wouldn&#x27;t have strange nags about margins and capitalization and other formatting nonsense, so it is clear they basically do almost nothing on this front.If they did any serious typesetting, they&#x27;d be fine with a simple Markdown or e.g. RMarkdown file, BibTeX and&#x2F;or other standard format bibliography file, and figures meeting certain specifications, but instead, you often get demands for Word files that meet specific text size and margin requirements, or to use LaTeX templates. There are exceptions to this, of course.

As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They&#x27;re usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees.For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers&#x27; duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.Frankly, in the digital age, the &quot;publishers&quot; are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.

It isn’t, but to get a full professorship, you need to publish in higher ranked journals. APC-Open-Access is just another iteration of the parasitic business model of the few big publishers. In the end, universities pay the same amounts to the publishers as before, or even more. This business model can only be overcome if and when academia changes the rules for assessment of application to higher ranked academic positions. There are journals that are entirely run by scientists and scientific libraries. Only in this model the peer review and publishing platform becomes a commodity.

value creation - it&#x27;s not a hamburger but something serious!

Laundering prestige. Journals do almost nothing, and serious researchers (by which I mean, people who actually care about advancing knowledge, not careerist academics) haven&#x27;t cared much about journal prestige for over a decade, at least.

You can look at the finances of the ACM here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;nonprofits&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;131921358" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;nonprofits&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;131...</a>

How is $1450 justified in modern times?Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would&#x27;ve understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?

That’s not the only option, though. There is also institutional membership, which is basically the same as the previous subscription model, just pitched the other way around. Authors whose institutions are members don’t have to pay the processing charge.Here’s the list of current members: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libraries.acm.org&#x2F;acmopen&#x2F;open-participants" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libraries.acm.org&#x2F;acmopen&#x2F;open-participants</a>

&gt; Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC)Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).

The computer science that matters the most today —- machine learning, vision, NLP —- is open access without the fees because the main confs are not ACM. (Vision has some in IEEE.)I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.

This is called &quot;gold open access&quot; and is a scam.
It&#x27;s just journals hijacking the open access initiative and raping it.

I&#x27;ve been in academia for more decades than I&#x27;d like to state, and I have never heard of an institute that covered article processing charges.  I work in a natural science.  Maybe things are different in computing fields, though.

I think this APC system is terrible -- it&#x27;s enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged &gt;$1000.Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoretics.episciences.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoretics.episciences.org&#x2F;</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lmcs.episciences.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lmcs.episciences.org&#x2F;</a>) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it&#x27;s important that other authors can submit and publish there too.

The financials of open access are interesting.Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;authors.acm.org&#x2F;open-access" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;authors.acm.org&#x2F;open-access</a>

&gt; A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science optimizations.Note that older articles have already been open access for a while now:&gt; April 7, 2022&gt; ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of its publishing program. These articles, published between 1951 and the end of 2000, are now open and freely available to view and download via the ACM Digital Library.- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acm.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bulletins&#x2F;2022&#x2F;april&#x2F;50-years-backfile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acm.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bulletins&#x2F;2022&#x2F;april&#x2F;50-years-b...</a>

This is huge. A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science optimizations. The ACM programming competitions in college are some of my fondest memories!

And they spent years resisting pressure for open access before that: this has been in the air for a long time.

When I read the publications (the ACM magazine), I swear sometimes the content feels LLM generated.  Does anyone else get that impression?  In general, I&#x27;m not very impressed with the content (I&#x27;m used to WIRED, btw).

&gt; My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated&#x2F;assisted papers.ACM started this open access effort back in 2020, I don&#x27;t think that LLM generated papers were on their mind when they started it.

The Digital Library contains a lot of older material which predates the Web and has often never been put online anywhere else: old Joint Computer Conference papers and so on.

&gt; e.g., we handle our own formattingI used to work for a small publisher some years ago, and while this is true to some degree, we spent a lot of effort doing additional formatting or correcting formatting mistakes. For a typical journal publication, this process alone takes weeks if you&#x27;re aiming at a high-quality publication.On top of that, there are a lot of small things that you typically don&#x27;t get if a paper is just put on the author&#x27;s website, such as e.g. long-term archiving, a DOI, integration with services like dblp, metadata curation, etc.Now, to what degree these features are an added value to you personally varies from person to person. Some people or even workshops are totally fine with simply publishing the PDFs written by the authors on a website, and there&#x27;s nothing wrong with that, ymmv.

Conflicted. Obviously open access is great, but it&#x27;s never been that difficult to find most papers either on arxiv or the author&#x27;s website. And I despise the idea of paying to publish, especially since unlike other fields the &quot;processing&quot; required for CS papers is minimal (e.g., we handle our own formatting). FWIW, USENIX conference papers are both open access and free to publish.My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated&#x2F;assisted papers.

So this link is interesting for a different reason: look at the references at the end of the paper. It&#x27;s awesome that the references include URLs. IMHO, old papers should all be updated to include such hyperlinks.I&#x27;m pleased that the references to other ACM papers do work.But try to click on this one:Bainbridge, L. 1983. Ironies of automation. Automatica 19(6): 775-779;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdfs.semanticscholar.org&#x2F;0713&#x2F;bb9d9b138e4e0a15406006de9b0cddf68e28.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdfs.semanticscholar.org&#x2F;0713&#x2F;bb9d9b138e4e0a15406006...</a>Fail! No way to read the paper without paying or pirating by using scihub (and even if you do get the .pdf via scihub, its references are not hyperlinks). This does not help humanity, it makes us look like morons. FFS, even the music industry was able to figure this out.

It&#x27;s so great that I&#x27;ve shared it with every Trade Desk, DevOps, SRE and Infra team I&#x27;ve ever worked with.

Wow!  Thank you so much!  Quite a compliment!

Is this relevant?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typst.app&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2025&#x2F;automated-generation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typst.app&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2025&#x2F;automated-generation</a>

This article about how to go from manual processes to automation is still one of the greatest ACM publications ever written:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;queue.acm.org&#x2F;detail.cfm?id=3197520" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;queue.acm.org&#x2F;detail.cfm?id=3197520</a>

I don&#x27;t disagree that the ultimate goal is have open and free access is a noble goal. I just point our that what is happening in practice is that it is being taken as a new business model that pays on average more for the publishers. I&#x27;m not sure my comment implies I criticize the open access concept and I apologize if it is not clear.

Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it&#x27;s an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.

I have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid for any peer review I&#x27;ve ever done and none of those was for an open access publication.

And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy things you&#x27;re familiar with if you&#x27;ve been say a cable TV subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good thing and saying that&#x27;s a 5-for-1 offer when actually it&#x27;s just an excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted.This isn&#x27;t the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.

&gt; Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer moneyIn addition to what @tokai said, I think it&#x27;s also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).

I think the Elsevier model will eventually be deprecated, at the least for the open sector of society (aka taxpayers money). People demand that when they pay taxes, they should not have to pay again due to Elsevier and I think this is a reasonable demand. Many researchers also support this.

It seems that perhaps neither are inherently &#x27;good models&#x27;? What would an ideal alternative look like?

&gt;PLoS [...]At low costs of $2k~$3k per publication[0]. Elsevier closed-access journals will charge you $0 to publish your paper.&gt;Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model.Elsevier is also[1] moving to APC for their journals because is better business.&gt;The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public moneyJournals (usually) forbid you of sharing the published (supposedly edited) version of a paper. You&#x27;re allowed to share the pre-published draft (see arXiv). Institutions could (and some indeed do) supply those drafts on their own.&gt;Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.At the expense of making research more expensive and hence more exclusive. It&#x27;s money rather quality that matters now. Thus it isn&#x27;t unsurprising that Frontiers &amp; MDPI, two very known open-access proponent publishers, are also very known to publishing garbage. It&#x27;s ironic that once was said that any journal asking you for money to publish your paper is predatory, yet nowadays somehow this is considered best practice.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plos.org&#x2F;fees&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plos.org&#x2F;fees&#x2F;</a>
[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elsevier.com&#x2F;open-access" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elsevier.com&#x2F;open-access</a>

Authors may NOT be paid at all for their work, or may even pay to do it.I am a self-funded PhD student and no one paid me for the work that went into my open access paper. As it happens in this case the journal waived the publication fee, so no one paid anyone anything except I suppose the nominal pro-rata portion of my university fees that I paid.

Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are the ones that generally do not get paid for their work.Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money).Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.

Where are you getting such inexpensive textbooks???Kidding, i agree $30-50 per article is outrageous.

&gt; Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money...While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it&#x27;s a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.

I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open system is it does away with the difference between &quot;prestigious&quot; and &quot;non-prestigious&quot; journals. &quot;Prestigiousness&quot; is actually a really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from the ground up in an open and fair system. It&#x27;s almost like &quot;prestige&quot; can only emerge in a system of selfish&#x2F;profit-motivated actors.

this is pubmed. Most papers that are funded by NIH research are available on pubmed if the main publisher gives access to the full text (after some set embargo period...usually around a year).

It&#x27;d be flooded in seconds with millions of AI-generated articles. arXiv is already suffering from this.

Fun fact: zenodo, which is used very often to archive (academic) software artifacts, is funded by the EU (+adjacent countries) and is basically part of CERN.

We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It&#x27;d cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades.It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You&#x27;d need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.It&#x27;s not a hard technical problem, it&#x27;s not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that&#x27;s where bad faith actors get to pretend they&#x27;re providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.

Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals. My supervisor doesn&#x27;t have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad students&#x27; summer salaryEach time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.

but what prevents scientists (as both authors and reviewers) from banding together and creating journals that don&#x27;t require money (freeing money for research budgets)?

I like the way that people add “a friendly reminder” like they’re just jogging your memory of a well known fact.Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They are not foisting this on people because it’s a new great scheme they’ve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.

Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that). That&#x27;s because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees (thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.

its a huge amount of high quality content. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org</a>. The older stuff was opened a few years back.

Ok that&#x27;s good but ... what exactly will be open accessed?
Do they keep a lot of what is important or interesting? I
really don&#x27;t know right now. They should have also added
the relevancy of that announcement; right now I just don&#x27;t
know what will all be opened, so I hope to find this information
in the comments here.

Are you going to reverse your nonsense &quot;these publications already come with a summary, so we&#x27;ve added a worse, AI generated summary and making that the first thing you see instead&quot; decision though?

It is almost unanimously agreed upon that impact factor is a flawed way of assessing scientific output, and there are a lot of ideas on how this could be done better. None of them have taken hold. Publishers are mostly a reputation cartel.Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.

It&#x27;s flawed, but what is a better idea? We definitely need curation.

I wish there were more open discussions about how &quot;Journal Impact Factor&quot; came to be so important.It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web of Science&#x2F;Journal Citation Reports).

Great news. I&#x27;ve bookmarked an article back in 2009 but didn&#x27;t want to pay $80 for it.

There will be customers even though it is a useless feature tier.Monetizing knowledge-work is nearly impossible if you want everyone to be rational about it. You gotta go for irrational customers like university and giant-org contracts, and that will happen here because of institutional inertia.

I&#x27;m kinda okay with putting the AI slop behind a paywall if it means nobody will actually see it.

I came here with this perspective and it made the rest of the thread feel like submarine PR cleanup for this mess. Perhaps they can afford to keep their high profits because of AI company money?

Yeah, that&#x27;s my assumption, too. I hate it.

&gt; * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessionsAlso AI-generated, presumably.

They also prefix every PDF with a useless page telling you the authors (which are already listed on the first (now second) page anyways) and a list telling you which of the author&#x27;s universities were members of ACM Open and paid for the publishing via flatrate.The latter is of course the actual reason for this extra page, but it is also entirely useless information since the people reading the paper don&#x27;t care. The people writing the paper are also usually annoyed by this (source: I&#x27;m an author of one such paper)

A lot of discussion about the benefits&#x2F;drawbacks of open access publishing, but I don&#x27;t see anybody talking about the other thing that&#x27;s coming along with this commitment to open access: the ACM is introducing a &quot;premium&quot; membership tier behind which various features of the Digital Library will be paywalled. From their info page [0], &quot;premium&quot; features include:<pre><code> * Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery
 * AI-generated article summaries
 * Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
 * Advanced search
 * Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and citations received
 * Bulk citation exports and PDF downloads
</code></pre>
The AI-generated article summaries has been getting a lot of discussion in my social circles. They have apparently fed many (all?) papers into some LLM to generate summaries... which is absurd when you consider that practically every article has an abstract as part of its text and submission. These abstract were written by the authors and have been reviewed more than almost any other part of the articles, so they are very unlikely to contain errors. In contrast, multiple of my colleagues have found errors of varying scales in the AI-generated summaries of their own papers — many of which are actually longer than the existing abstracts.In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials.I think it&#x27;s interesting that the ACM is positioning these &quot;premium&quot; features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;premium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;premium</a>[1] The Digital Library homepage (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;</a>) features a banner right now that says: &quot;ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library&#x27;s transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition.&quot;

Awesome, thanks for posting your experience with an interesting model.

Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training&#x2F;onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary.Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that&#x27;s not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it&#x27;s just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It&#x27;s leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.

This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs, Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That&#x27;s what they&#x27;ll say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the market bears.

I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it&#x27;s ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don&#x27;t do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tug.org&#x2F;TUGboat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tug.org&#x2F;TUGboat&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Good publishing costs moneyGood faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?

It&#x27;s bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn&#x27;t demand such finicky formatting and&#x2F;or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial.

You say there are costs, but you don&#x27;t say what the costs actually are.

CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year&#x27;s content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.

&gt; I don&#x27;t understand why anyone would want to publish anythingWhy do research if you don&#x27;t publish it? It&#x27;s like running a farm and letting the food rot in the fields every year, nobody eating it. The value of knowledge is sharing it with others.In a history of technology and science I read, the author pointed out that likely there have been many discoveries that, because they weren&#x27;t shared outside the village, are lost to time (including because of a lack of widespread literacy). You might add the arts to that - how many great stories were lost?

I am doing a PhD (by publication, self-funded) because I want to improve how we are decarbonising home heating in the UK, and one target audience is academics, and those papers also support communications with policy makers and industry.  As I have made clear to my supervisors the PhD would be a nice bauble side-effect of this climate fixing work.

I don&#x27;t understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but perhaps that&#x27;s because I don&#x27;t need a &quot;reputation&quot;.I also don&#x27;t understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It&#x27;s like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.

I don&#x27;t care, I&#x27;ll keep using sci-hub.

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

Hmm, and yet they were  still pushing the digital library subscription as recently as two months ago.

I think they&#x27;re already available?
e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;epdf&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;942572.807045" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;epdf&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;942572.807045</a>

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.

How is this Discords fault at all? I thought almost all bug bounties don’t apply to 3rd party services.

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

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

It&#x27;s not immediately clear from reading this what this means for ACM books, both older ones and new ones. I&#x27;m a fan of a lot of their older books, such as the Turing Award Lecture anthology they published in the early 1990s. I&#x27;m also interested in some of the newer books they&#x27;ve published in the last several years (The tributes to Dijkstra and Hoare especially stand out). I really hope these are included as well.

i dont even understand why these things exist...just publish your stuff in a website... on a blog, on github....

Finally! Free material to ingest in our LLMs (while it violates copyright, it&#x27;s good for the humanity as the reasoning of LLMs can lead to new discoveries and more widespread knowledge).

Very good and appreciated, but I think for math&#x2F;CS the problem is essentially solved by virtue of having arxiv.org strongly embedded into the culture, so I consider it just a PR stunt. Thanks nevertheless.

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&#x27;s incentive would be maintaining their reputation.

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.

Does this kind of general shift more firmly establish a marketplace and business model for eminent &quot;peers&quot; 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.

After ACL, now ACM set its papers free; let&#x27;S hope IEEE will be next.

Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access