Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transformative Open Access Agreement
In March 2020, the California Institute of Technology committed to ACM OPEN, a transformative open access publishing agreement with the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), alongside several other partner institutions (Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California system, and Iowa State University, among others). The agreement, which runs for three years beginning January 1, 2020, covers open access publication in all of ACM’s journals, conference proceedings, and magazines for all Caltech corresponding authors (as well as authors from any of the other participating institutions), along with subscription access to the ACM's Digital Library, excluding ACM Books.
Through participation in this transformative agreement, the universities are transitioning their annual library subscription fees for ACM to open access publishing fees. In doing so, they have expanded the universe of readers and the scholarly impact of their authors by making their ACM-published articles open immediately upon publication.
- Agreement Basics
- Caltech Payment for Open Access
- Resources
Agreement Basics
This agreement enables Caltech corresponding authors to make all articles and conference papers in the ACM Digital Library open access immediately at no cost to the author. Instead, Caltech is paying ACM a single fee to cover both article publication costs and subscription access. Authors who elect open access may select a Creative Commons license for article sharing and reuse. In addition, all Caltech corresponding authors can choose to retain copyright in their articles regardless of open access status.
Caltech faculty, staff, and students also continue to receive unlimited and unrestricted access to all content (open access and subscription) in the ACM Digital Library.
Caltech Payment for Open Access
Through this agreement, no article-level payments are necessary to make articles from Caltech corresponding authors open access in the ACM Digital Library; instead the Caltech Library is paying a single fee to cover both subscription access to the ACM Digital Library and open access publication costs. Until the mechanics of the agreement are in place, Caltech authors whose articles are accepted by ACM and who want to publish open access may request this option from ACM, and may be contacted directly by ACM for this purpose. There should be no charge to Caltech authors, so, if you do receive an email with an invoice, simply reply to the email and reference the Caltech/ACM open access arrangement. ACM will recognize @caltech.edu email addresses of corresponding authors as being Caltech affiliates. Use of other email addresses by a Caltech corresponding author will require additional work to secure the Open Access benefits of the ACM OPEN agreement.
Resources
Text based on University of California Office of Scholarly Communications ACM OPEN website.
