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. https://authors.acm.org/open-access

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'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.

  * 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

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's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" 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] https://dl.acm.org/premium

[1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520

My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.

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/Journal Citation Reports).

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.

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

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

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

I also don'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's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.