[sixtyfourbits]

This is nice and all, but there's no valid justification for any of the material in the digital library to be locked behind a paywall in the first place. Most of the research published by ACM was paid for by taxpayers, and authors have to either sign over copyright or grant exclusive publishing rights. To be fair, ACM's fees are far more reasonable than the big publishing companies, and there are open access options available (at a cost to authors).

They opened the whole thing up for unlimited access for a brief period during the pandemic, but decided to walk that back after just three months. If you know where to look, there's a 500gb torrent floating round with the 480k+ papers that were accessible as of June 2020.

It's sad that in this day and age, particularly with the widespread acceptance of open source, most academic publications are still behind a paywall. We shouldn't even be having discussions about "open access"; the "open" part should just be implicit.

[okennedy]

To their credit, US and EU funding agencies agree with you! Back at the start of 2016 or so, the NSF started adding clauses to grant contracts requiring that all research supported by new NSF awards be deposited in its open access repository: https://par.nsf.gov/ Results from there don't seem to show up in major search engines, neither academic (Google Scholar, DBLP), nor general (DDG, Google). Nevertheless, many ACM articles from the past 5 years can be found there. Similar repositories exist for other funding agencies.

Also worth noting: Many ACM publications will be cross-posted on ArXiV (https://arxiv.org) or faculty webpages. It's an open secret that many faculty will publish "preprint" versions of their articles there after the paper passes peer review, but before they sign any licensing agreement with a publisher.

[skywhopper]

Agreed, and the post does say they plan to make it all freely available within five years. Why the delay? I don’t know.

[samth]

Their plan is to open everything once they have enough organizations signed up for their ACM OPEN plan (basically once they replace the current income from the digital library).

[mindcrime]

Now if only we could get IEEE to make the same kind of committment...