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 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.
2022 ACM Open Access Journal Performance
ACM is proud to be a part of Plan S, and our 2022 transformative OA journal performance is reported below. ACM is committed to a sustainable path to Open Access publication, a path which we continue to forge through the spread of our innovative ACM Open program. With 675 ACM Open partner institutions and numerous ongoing conversations with potential new partners worldwide, the ACM Open program is enabling a true transformation of ACM’s publications.
Across ACM’s Transformative Journals, the open access penetration rate has grown from just 9% in 2020 to 18% in 2021, and 29% in 2022. Notable highlights in the 2022 figures include Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (PACMCGIT) at 55% OA article share, ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing (TQC) at 41%, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) at 114 OA articles representing 40% of articles published in the journal, ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS) and Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) both at 38%, and Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI) with 203 OA articles representing 34% of articles published in the journal. However, with relatively small journals, there will inevitably be variation in the open access share from year to year.
ACM’s OA papers overwhelmingly outperformed their paywalled counterparts in our transformative journals. Particular standouts were ACM Computing Surveys with average downloads of 5378 per article in 2022 for OA papers vs. 1675 for non-OA; ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing with 4709 for OA papers vs. 361 for non-OA; ACM Transactions on the Web with 3360 for OA vs. 345 for non-OA; and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction with 2210 for OA vs. 909 for non-OA. It is probably too early to assess the impact of OA on citations in our transformative journals. However, a few initial positive indicators come from ACM Computing Surveys with average citations per article to date for OA articles of 10.09 vs. 5.05 for non-OA; ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications with 7.46 average citations for OA articles vs. 3.58 for non-OA; and ACM Transactions on Internet of Things with 3.38 average citations for OA articles vs. 1.19 for non-OA.
ACM is confident that our OA growth trajectory will continue strongly and responsibly towards our goal of a full flip to open access, currently anticipated to occur around January 2026. As a global publisher, ACM is committed to providing a high-quality publishing venue for all researchers worldwide. We are proud of our 2022 transformative agreement with EIFL, and we are close to signing a similar agreement with Research4Life, key initiatives to enable authors from low- and middle-income countries, especially in the global south, to publish their articles OA with ACM at no charge. Since certain regions are at different stages of their journey to open access, ACM continues to work closely with libraries, policy makers, and researchers around the world to ensure increasing adoption of the ACM Open model as we progress towards a fully OA future.
2022 ACM Open Access Journal Article Calculations