Plan S Compliance
ACM is pleased to announce that authors receiving research grants from Coalition S funders and supporters are compliant with Plan S requirements as of January 2022 when publishing their research articles with ACM.
As an organization committed to sustainable Open Access and to supporting our authors around the world, ACM has worked directly with the leadership of Coalition S and the ACM Publications Board to ensure compliance with the Plan S criteria for transformative publications as published here.
As an ACM author, you are able to comply with Coalition S funder requirements to make your article available under a CC BY license in one of three ways – (1) you are a corresponding author based at an ACM Open institution, (2) you, your funder, or institution, has agreed to cover the cost of Article Processing Charges (APCs) for the published version of record (VOR), or (3) if you are unable to pay an APC under the first two scenarios, you may assign a CC BY license to your accepted manuscript version (AM). For more information on Plan S compliance, please contact us at dl-info@hq.acm.org.
ACM Statement on Plan S Compliance
ACM is rapidly transitioning Open Access (OA). The Association has taken a major decision in the past 2 years to transition to a fully open ACM Digital Library within a 5-year time frame, provided this can be done in a financially responsible and sustainable way. ACM Publications will each transition at a faster or slower pace, based on the annual fluctuation in the mix of authors, articles, and institutions. However, until fully open, our policies are designed to enable our authors to comply with the vast majority of funder mandates around the world, including those funders who participate in cOAlition S.
ACM’s "Anti Double-Dipping” Policy
When ACM's Publications Board launched its hybrid OA model in 2013, it did so with a commitment to the scientific and library communities to eliminate the possibility of double-dipping with respect to ACM's hybrid OA program. Since that time, ACM has been collecting all APC income from authors who select the hybrid OA option in ACM hybrid publications and maintaining this income in what it has been called a “Hybrid Open Access Fund.” Income in this fund is used to reduce or eliminate annual licensing fees and/or APC charges to authors from low-income countries (as defined by the World Bank List of Economies).
Plan S
Plan S requires that compliant publishers reduce subscription fees during their transitions to becoming fully Open Access publishers. ACM is committed to doing so in a transparent, as well as sustainable and responsible manner, including returning such income to academic ACM Digital Library subscribing institutions as credits against their next year's ACM DL access license fees. Since launching this program, ACM has returned in excess of $1,000,000 in APC income to the global academic library community from over 100 countries around the world. ACM is also committed to reducing individual hybrid journal subscription fees based on a percentage of OA income from APCs for those journals, as required by Plan S policy.
Lastly, ACM is utilizing part of this Hybrid OA Fund to underwrite the launch of new Gold OA journals, as well as to transition existing ACM journals to a pure Gold OA model. Where we have fully transitioned the hybrid model to 100 percent OA for our Gold OA publications, we have eliminated subscriptions entirely.