ACM To Make Its Entire Digital Library Open Access Starting January 2026 (acm.org)
(Friday December 19, 2025 @11:54AM (msmash)
from the some-good-news dept.)
- Reference: 0180423545
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/168225/acm-to-make-its-entire-digital-library-open-access-starting-january-2026
- Source link: https://dl.acm.org/openaccess
The Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that all publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will [1]become freely available to everyone starting January 2026. Authors will retain full copyright to their published work under the new arrangement, and ACM has committed to defending those works against copyright and integrity-related violations.
The transition follows what ACM described as extensive dialogue with authors, Special Interest Group leaders, editorial boards, libraries, and research institutions globally. Students, educators, and researchers at institutions of all sizes -- from well-resourced universities to emerging research communities -- will gain unrestricted access to the full catalog of ACM-published work. The Digital Library houses decades of computing research across journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and books.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/openaccess
The transition follows what ACM described as extensive dialogue with authors, Special Interest Group leaders, editorial boards, libraries, and research institutions globally. Students, educators, and researchers at institutions of all sizes -- from well-resourced universities to emerging research communities -- will gain unrestricted access to the full catalog of ACM-published work. The Digital Library houses decades of computing research across journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and books.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/openaccess
Yawn. (Score:1)
by Warren416 ( 2436238 )
ACM who?
Well done. Time for copyright reform. (Score:1)
by greytree ( 7124971 )
It is way past time for profit to be made from other things than the abused copyright system.
Newspapers and publishers should make their money from micro-payments for access to new IP, their old IP should quickly lose copyright and become free for everyone.
Copyright is a *privilege* we give to *creators* to encourage *creation*, not an endless money source for parasites to live off others' old creations.
Re: (Score:2)
by taustin ( 171655 )
The law does not agree with you. And most of the people who understand it think you're ridiculous.
Good news? (Score:2)
by hardwarejunkie9 ( 878942 )
Huh. That'll actually make my life a bit easier. Not used to seeing that lately.
Re: (Score:2)
Other than the IEEE, the ACM is the largest publisher for anything tech related, and is probably larger than IEEE for things strictly related to CS and numerous other sub-fields. If they're irrelevant than everyone else is even more irrelevant.
Hopefully others follow suit with this. The majority of the research published in these journals or conferences is funded by our tax dollars. All of that content already belongs to us and the idea that access to it requires a multi-hundred dollar subscription is lu
Re: (Score:2)
They may not be irrelevant, but there is certainly not a lot of value in the actual distribution part. All interesting documents that are published there are available elsewhere. Removing the paywall just shortens the current algorithm: 1. Google search for some terms. 2. Find ACM paper that looks interesting, but paywalled. 3 Copy the exact title and search for that. Download a PDF from a random source that has it. This is from a pure "user" of the articles perspective. It might be of a bigger benefit f