(23 Jan 2020) ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, entered into transformative open access agreements with several of its largest institutional customers, including the University of California (UC), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Iowa State University (ISU). The agreements, which run for three-year terms beginning January 1, 2020, cover both access to and open access publication in ACM’s journals, proceedings and magazines for these universities, and represent the first transformative open access agreements for ACM.
“This joint agreement shows our universities’ collective power to secure the widest possible readership for our research,” said Keith Webster, Carnegie Mellon’s Dean of Libraries and Director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives. “By doing so, scholars at Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions can more rapidly advance innovation and discoveries that benefit society. If we want to see real momentum in changing from restrictive, costly publishing models to those that provide open access to our scholarly work, libraries must work together to build the business models of the future.”
Under the new agreements, faculty and students of UC, CMU, MIT and ISU will continue to receive unlimited and unrestricted access to all articles in the ACM Digital Library during the three-year term. Beginning January 1, 2020, articles with corresponding authors from these institutions published during the period of the agreements in ACM journals, conference proceedings and magazines will be made openly available at the time of publication at no cost to the authors.
Additionally, ACM will make deposits into institutional repositories for all co-authors from these universities. The new agreement also expands the range of rights authors retain when publishing with ACM.
“This agreement brings to life a bold vision for how society publishers and universities can work together to make full open access a reality,” said Jeff MacKie-Mason, University Librarian at UC Berkeley, co-chair of the team overseeing UC’s publisher negotiations and a member of ACM. “We can — and will — work with publishers of all sizes to navigate the transition to open access so that researchers and the public have free and immediate access to the world’s knowledge.”
This new transformative open access publishing model was developed in collaboration with UC, CMU, MIT and ISU.
The original press release can be found here.
