In January, the University of California announced an agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) - the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society - to make it easier for UC authors to publish open access in ACM journals, conferences, and magazines. The workflow for the agreement went into effect on May 13, 2020.
For all UC corresponding authors, open access is now the default publication option for research and review articles in any ACM journal, conference, or magazine. This is made possible through an institutionally prepaid publishing agreement. Authors can opt out of the open access arrangement and publish behind a paywall if they so choose.
The pilot agreement runs from January 2020 through December 31, 2022, and applies to manuscripts submitted and articles published during that period. There is no payment necessary by the author because through this agreement UC is paying ACM a single bulk fee to cover both UC article publication costs and subscription access to the ACM Digital Library.
Under the new agreements, faculty and students of UC will continue to receive unlimited and unrestricted access to all articles in the ACM Digital Library during the three-year term. Additionally, ACM will make deposits into institutional repositories for all co-authors from these universities. The new agreement also expands the range of rights authors retain when publishing with ACM.
This new transformative open access publishing model was developed in collaboration with UC, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and Iowa State University. To learn more, read the May 13 UC Office of Scholarly Communication post or the ACM Frequently Asked Questions page.
