Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]
Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.
The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen quantity over quality.
Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.
I disagree. We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I think these new incentives are exactly what we want:
1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.
2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.
3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.
Indeed, they are irrelevant. Right now they maintain an administrative monopoly over the peer review process, that makes them de-facto arbiters even if it's peers doing the work.
Journals should either become tech companies offering (and charging for) new and exciting ways to present scientific research, or simply stop existing.
Completely off topic, but thanks for creating AudioMulch, I don't use it actively anymore but it totally revolutionized how I approach working with sound!
I can tell you for a fact that points 2 and 3 usually do not hold simply because publishing fees are directly correlated with the "prestige" perception of the journal.
These are all valid points. I think we agree we are just looking at different things, I argued if journals maintained their arbiter quality then the system is bad, but you rightly point out that this could finally grip this quality out of their hands, and so it could be good for science overall actually. I think these are fair points :)
I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.
They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?
Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.
> Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers.
That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.
This would probably depend heavily on how tenure decisions handles publishing. If it is heavily biased towards quantity of publishing, then that won't matter as much as you can "pay to win your paycheck".
If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should work better.
The people that pay are the Institutions (Universities mainly). Not the readers. The publications are sold to them as bundles even if the Institution does not want all the journals.
Yes you are correct, however I don't understand how this relates to my point, do you mind clarifying? I'd also caveat that the library (the purchaser of these bundles at most universities) often buys bundles based on requests from academics (more specifically research groups/departments) at the university, thus the readers do have some sway over which are purchased.
I do not know specifics of bundling agreements (shocker that I admit not knowing something:). I do know that libraries at some Institutions have started to provide funds to their researchers to pay the APCs. The library then goes to the Open Access publisher and negotiates bulk APC deals if they commit to a certain number of publications. Sort of a win win grant wise. This does not necessarily guaranty publication but if it does not get published you don't pay (processing submissions is an expense Open Access publishers incurs).
I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts access to information.
I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and research money.
I would also argue that there are other problems within research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you for the honest discussion.
Is it a fee for publication or a fee for reviewing?
Found,
> Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
It is on acceptance almost universally. This is why more selective journals have higher APCs. The overhead of reviewing and processing more papers when less ultimately convert costs money.
It still wouldn't be perfect, but I'd like to see a system that rewarded publishers and authors for coming up with work that was a load bearing citation for other work (by different authors on different publishers, i.e. ones with no ulterior motive for having chosen it as a source).
Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.
You know, we briefly had this with the h-index, and now h-index manipulation is so rife that it is no longer highly correlated with successful academic careers
The whole publication model is broken, not just the incentives. It used to be researchers eager to share their new findings with the few hundred people that could understand them, now it's throngs of PhD students grinding their way to degrees and postdocs trying to secure tenure. The journals are flooded with nonsense and actual researchers resort to word of mouth point out valuable papers to each other.
Disagree. The journals are now acting like a paid certification. If they admit any old slop, who would pay to submit their papers?
The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions.
Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?
Small correction to your point: they perhaps provide a reason for peer review to happen, but it's scientists themselves who coordinate and provide the actual peer review.
That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.
The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee.
For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
I doubt that this is true except maybe for the top journals. Mid and low tier journals cater to scientists whose main incentive is to publish no matter how while moderately optimizing for impact factor (i.e. readers and citations). This lower quality market is huge. The fact that even top tier publishers have created low-ranking journals that address this market segment using APC-based open-access models shows the alignment between publisher and author interests will not necessarily lead to increasing quality, rather the opposite.
For academia's sake I hope you are correct, but my experience of the system leads me to suspect otherwise, though only time will tell.
One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees.
For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.
Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.
Didn't expect Brazil being off the "List of Countries Qualifying for APC Waivers"
Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.
This is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also.
Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil.
These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.
I don't, I publish directly on Wikiversity. There it's available to read, use and edit by every follow human with an internet connection. Those willing to contribute with feedback can do so through discussion pages.
This is quite a good thing, as you will no longer have to buy all the research papers to advance your own research.
The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you finance that or choose to publish in another journal.
Most reputable journals will waive the fees in this case, though the easier route if you are in a rich country where this is less likely is to partner with an institution. They get to add to their research output stats and you get your funding, a win win.
For those looking for examples, see the clickspring youtube channel on the "Antikythera mechanism", he is a skilled watchmaker and he works with academics on actual reseach whilst building a replica, despite having no acadeic affiliation himself (at least that I know of, feel free to correct me if I am wrong).
Some journals support “green open access”, where you can share your article minus the journal’s formatting on open repositories etc, sometimes some time after publication, which is usually free. I can’t see any mention of this from the ACM though
CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs, Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That's what they'll say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the market bears.
I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example.
Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary.
Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience.
> long-term preservation
How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files.
> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation
I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements, many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central, which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a structured XML version of papers.
Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
So this link is interesting for a different reason: look at the references at the end of the paper. It's awesome that the references include URLs. IMHO, old papers should all be updated to include such hyperlinks.
I'm pleased that the references to other ACM papers do work.
But try to click on this one:
Bainbridge, L. 1983. Ironies of automation. Automatica 19(6): 775-779;
Fail! No way to read the paper without paying or pirating by using scihub (and even if you do get the .pdf via scihub, its references are not hyperlinks). This does not help humanity, it makes us look like morons. FFS, even the music industry was able to figure this out.
Conflicted. Obviously open access is great, but it's never been that difficult to find most papers either on arxiv or the author's website. And I despise the idea of paying to publish, especially since unlike other fields the "processing" required for CS papers is minimal (e.g., we handle our own formatting). FWIW, USENIX conference papers are both open access and free to publish.
My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
The Digital Library contains a lot of older material which predates the Web and has often never been put online anywhere else: old Joint Computer Conference papers and so on.
When I read the publications (the ACM magazine), I swear sometimes the content feels LLM generated. Does anyone else get that impression? In general, I'm not very impressed with the content (I'm used to WIRED, btw).
I wish there were more open discussions about how "Journal Impact Factor" came to be so important.
It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports).
It is almost unanimously agreed upon that impact factor is a flawed way of assessing scientific output, and there are a lot of ideas on how this could be done better. None of them have taken hold. Publishers are mostly a reputation cartel.
Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.
Finally! Free material to ingest in our LLMs (while it violates copyright, it's good for the humanity as the reasoning of LLMs can lead to new discoveries and more widespread knowledge).
It's not immediately clear from reading this what this means for ACM books, both older ones and new ones. I'm a fan of a lot of their older books, such as the Turing Award Lecture anthology they published in the early 1990s. I'm also interested in some of the newer books they've published in the last several years (The tributes to Dijkstra and Hoare especially stand out). I really hope these are included as well.
This is huge. A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science optimizations. The ACM programming competitions in college are some of my fondest memories!
> A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science optimizations.
Note that older articles have already been open access for a while now:
> April 7, 2022
> ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of its publishing program. These articles, published between 1951 and the end of 2000, are now open and freely available to view and download via the ACM Digital Library.
Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that). That's because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees (thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.
Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are the ones that generally do not get paid for their work.
Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money).
Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.
I think the Elsevier model will eventually be deprecated, at the least for the open sector of society (aka taxpayers money). People demand that when they pay taxes, they should not have to pay again due to Elsevier and I think this is a reasonable demand. Many researchers also support this.
At low costs of $2k~$3k per publication[0]. Elsevier closed-access journals will charge you $0 to publish your paper.
>Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model.
Elsevier is also[1] moving to APC for their journals because is better business.
>The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money
Journals (usually) forbid you of sharing the published (supposedly edited) version of a paper. You're allowed to share the pre-published draft (see arXiv). Institutions could (and some indeed do) supply those drafts on their own.
>Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.
At the expense of making research more expensive and hence more exclusive. It's money rather quality that matters now. Thus it isn't unsurprising that Frontiers & MDPI, two very known open-access proponent publishers, are also very known to publishing garbage. It's ironic that once was said that any journal asking you for money to publish your paper is predatory, yet nowadays somehow this is considered best practice.
Better busness or are their customers demanding it? PLoS is a Non-Profit - feel free to look up how much they make. I believe it is public record.
If researchers cannot pay the APC then PLoS often reduces the fee. Also - half of that grant money is used by the Institution as administrative overhead. An part of that overhead is paying Elsevier for journal access. If you want to decrease the cost of research that may be a better place to start.
I agree that volume often tends to result in garbage but the review is supposed to lessen that. Again that garbage did get funded some how.
I am not pushing PLoS - they are simply a publisher I am familiar with that uses this model.
The garbage thing is really interesting. I'm going to propose another reason for garbage is Academia's reliance on publication as the primary means for giving promotions and judging peoples work. This leads to all kinds of disfunction.
Was it Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs that said his University wanted to fire him because he didn't publish frequently enough?
Authors may NOT be paid at all for their work, or may even pay to do it.
I am a self-funded PhD student and no one paid me for the work that went into my open access paper. As it happens in this case the journal waived the publication fee, so no one paid anyone anything except I suppose the nominal pro-rata portion of my university fees that I paid.
That is true also. The pre-pub route may be your best bet if that is a concern. One shoe does not fit all feet. I am only trying to argue the merits of the Open Access model. It is certainly not perfect.
It is certainly not perfect. Competition/Choice is good. It is interesting that people do not understand their grant money is paying for it regardless. Either an upfront cost or through the administrative overhead the Institution gets from the grant.
Why was this comment flagged? There’s plenty of room to disagree with it, sure, but it isn’t offensive or repulsive or anything. If anything, I’d love to see it argued against…
> Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money...
While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.
I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.
We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades.
It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.
It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.
I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open system is it does away with the difference between "prestigious" and "non-prestigious" journals. "Prestigiousness" is actually a really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from the ground up in an open and fair system. It's almost like "prestige" can only emerge in a system of selfish/profit-motivated actors.
It is a kind of fuzzy signal though. Maybe a better replacement could be found. Like, if we all had PGP keys, we could just sign the article that we like, right? Then, a web-of-prestige that more accurately represents the field could be generated. ORCID could manage it, haha.
Well, yes, this is exactly the kind of well-intentioned technical solution that just will not work at all when it comes in contact with human nature. "Oh boy my paper got accepted in Nature!" vs - "oh boy some people on the internet signed my pgp thing!". Just not the same.
I wonder if we could form a graph that would make a collusion ring intuitively visible (I’m not sure what—between papers, authors, and signings—should be the edges and the nodes, though). Making these relationships explicit should help discover this kind of stuff, right?
Another problem with my idea is that a lot of famous luminaries wouldn’t bother playing the game, or are dead already. But, all we can really do is set up a game for those who’d like to play…
Prestige, in an honest system, would be a great signal. The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately gets gamed. Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available options. A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and selecting the best available studies and research - in the proposed system, nothing is preventing them from licensing material like any other potential platform or individual.
Profit motivated exclusivity under private control resulted in the enshittification vortex of adtech doom we're currently all drowning in. If you want prestige - top ten status in Google search results - you need to play the game they invented. Same goes for all of academia.
People stopped optimizing for good websites and utility and craft and started optimizing for keywords and technicalities and glitches in the matrix that bumped their ranking.
People stopped optimizing for beneficial novel research and started optimizing for topical grants, politically useful subjects, p hacking, and outright making shit up as long as it was valuable to the customers (grant agencies and institutions seeking particular outcomes, etc.)
Google is trash, and scientific publication is a flaming dumpster fire of reproducibility failure, fraud, politically motivated weasel wording nonsense, and profit motivated selective studies on medical topics that benefit pharma and chemical companies and the like.
Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications.
It's incredibly cheap and easy to host for free. It benefits everyone the most and harms the public the least to do it like that, and if a prestigious platform tries to push narrative bending propaganda, it can be directly and easily contradicted using the same open and public mechanisms. And if it happens in the other direction, with solid, but politically or commercially inconvenient research saying something that isn't appreciated by those with wealth or power, that research can be openly reproduced and replicated, all out in the open.
this is pubmed. Most papers that are funded by NIH research are available on pubmed if the main publisher gives access to the full text (after some set embargo period...usually around a year).
> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money
In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).
And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy things you're familiar with if you've been say a cable TV subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good thing and saying that's a 5-for-1 offer when actually it's just an excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted.
This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.
"Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price" This is brilliant. So much information packed into one sentence.
I have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid for any peer review I've ever done and none of those was for an open access publication.
Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.
I don't disagree that the ultimate goal is have open and free access is a noble goal. I just point our that what is happening in practice is that it is being taken as a new business model that pays on average more for the publishers. I'm not sure my comment implies I criticize the open access concept and I apologize if it is not clear.
Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals. My supervisor doesn't have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad students' summer salary
Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.
but what prevents scientists (as both authors and reviewers) from banding together and creating journals that don't require money (freeing money for research budgets)?
The natural change from this are the journals with no cost of publication. There is no way that the added value of the journal is thousands of dollars, especially given that the referees work for free.
In astrophysics we already have a journal like that is gaining traction after several publishers switched to golden open access.
The system when the taxpayer subsidizes enormous profit margins of Elsevier etc while relying on free work by referees is crazy
No, they did not. They made it free to download, but open-access† licensing would permit third parties to legally mirror it on servers that don't block access from Algeria or Switzerland or privacy-focused browsers, and so far that licensing hadn't happened. I'm happy to see that apparently it's happening today.
> Making the first 50 years of its publications and related content freely available expresses ACM’s commitment to open access publication and represents another milestone in our transition to full open access within the next five years.
I wouldn't have understood that nuance without the context given by your comment, but in my developer mind I analogize "freely available" to a "source available" license that they took on, as a step towards going open access ("free and open source") over time. I'm also happy to see that that transition seems on track as planned.
Only up to 2000. It’s unclear if the catalog from 2000 to 2025 will be fully made open. There may be legal obstacles if the originating authors and institutions don’t consent.
I haven’t been able to find anything that states otherwise. What changes in January is the policy for new publications.
Ok that's good but ... what exactly will be open accessed?
Do they keep a lot of what is important or interesting? I
really don't know right now. They should have also added
the relevancy of that announcement; right now I just don't
know what will all be opened, so I hope to find this information
in the comments here.
Is this going to include all of their back catalog? I’ve had a lot of free time lately and decided I’ve been missing the SIGPLAN proceedings and have b been procrastinating on reactivating my old membership to get them. I stopped when the paper version went away, which is ages ago now.
There’s some nuance to this surrounding the “creative commons” licensing of these ACM publications.
Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).
Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.
Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:
“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”
This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.
For me it was that and their unqualified support of H-1B visas.
The ACM always said it wanted to build bridges with practitioners but paywalled journals aren't the way to do it.
I would be 100% for more green cards or a better guestworker program of some kind, but I've seen so many good people on H-1Bs twisted into knots... Like the time the startup I was working for hired a new HR head and two weeks in treated an H-1B so bad the HR person quit. I wanted to tell this guy "your skills are in demand and you could get a job across the street" but that's wasn't true.
I joined the IEEE Computer Society because it had a policy to not have a policy which I could accept.
A lot of discussion about the benefits/drawbacks of open access publishing, but I don't see anybody talking about the other thing that's coming along with this commitment to open access: the ACM is introducing a "premium" membership tier behind which various features of the Digital Library will be paywalled. From their info page [0], "premium" features include:
* Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery
* AI-generated article summaries
* Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
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The AI-generated article summaries has been getting a lot of discussion in my social circles. They have apparently fed many (all?) papers into some LLM to generate summaries... which is absurd when you consider that practically every article has an abstract as part of its text and submission. These abstract were written by the authors and have been reviewed more than almost any other part of the articles, so they are very unlikely to contain errors. In contrast, multiple of my colleagues have found errors of varying scales in the AI-generated summaries of their own papers — many of which are actually longer than the existing abstracts.
In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials.
I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing.
[1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."
I came here with this perspective and it made the rest of the thread feel like submarine PR cleanup for this mess. Perhaps they can afford to keep their high profits because of AI company money?
There will be customers even though it is a useless feature tier.
Monetizing knowledge-work is nearly impossible if you want everyone to be rational about it. You gotta go for irrational customers like university and giant-org contracts, and that will happen here because of institutional inertia.
I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but perhaps that's because I don't need a "reputation".
I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.
> I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything
Why do research if you don't publish it? It's like running a farm and letting the food rot in the fields every year, nobody eating it. The value of knowledge is sharing it with others.
In a history of technology and science I read, the author pointed out that likely there have been many discoveries that, because they weren't shared outside the village, are lost to time (including because of a lack of widespread literacy). You might add the arts to that - how many great stories were lost?
Are you going to reverse your nonsense "these publications already come with a summary, so we've added a worse, AI generated summary and making that the first thing you see instead" decision though?
I think they probably have aggressive firewall with a lot of false positives. I live in Switzerland and got blocked but tried a VPN to US and it worked. Although it is usually that I get blocked for using VPN.
But I'm not sure if it is about your IP or the whole country but I guess it the former. Who knows what the firewall god at Cloudflare does.
They block agressively. Not only based on IP adresses. If you visit the site with a privacy-focussed browser or in private mode they will also tell you your IP is blocked.
Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]
Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.
1. https://authors.acm.org/open-access
Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.
1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.
2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.
3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.
Journals should either become tech companies offering (and charging for) new and exciting ways to present scientific research, or simply stop existing.
Completely off topic, but thanks for creating AudioMulch, I don't use it actively anymore but it totally revolutionized how I approach working with sound!
They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?
Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.
That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.
On the other hand predatory journals make a killing from APCs so there is some market for journals with no readers.
If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should work better.
I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts access to information.
I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and research money.
I would also argue that there are other problems within research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you for the honest discussion.
Found,
> Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.
There's got to be ways to improve things though.
The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions.
Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?
That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.
For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.
Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.
And who will curate the best research, especially for people outside your field? I can't follow the discussion in every field.
Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.
Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil.
[1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/
The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you finance that or choose to publish in another journal.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?
[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/
Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
> long-term preservation
How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files.
> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation
I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520
https://typst.app/blog/2025/automated-generation
I'm pleased that the references to other ACM papers do work.
But try to click on this one:
Bainbridge, L. 1983. Ironies of automation. Automatica 19(6): 775-779;
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0713/bb9d9b138e4e0a15406006...
Fail! No way to read the paper without paying or pirating by using scihub (and even if you do get the .pdf via scihub, its references are not hyperlinks). This does not help humanity, it makes us look like morons. FFS, even the music industry was able to figure this out.
My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
ACM started this open access effort back in 2020, I don't think that LLM generated papers were on their mind when they started it.
It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports).
Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.
Note that older articles have already been open access for a while now:
> April 7, 2022
> ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of its publishing program. These articles, published between 1951 and the end of 2000, are now open and freely available to view and download via the ACM Digital Library.
- https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-b...
Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money).
Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.
At low costs of $2k~$3k per publication[0]. Elsevier closed-access journals will charge you $0 to publish your paper.
>Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model.
Elsevier is also[1] moving to APC for their journals because is better business.
>The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money
Journals (usually) forbid you of sharing the published (supposedly edited) version of a paper. You're allowed to share the pre-published draft (see arXiv). Institutions could (and some indeed do) supply those drafts on their own.
>Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.
At the expense of making research more expensive and hence more exclusive. It's money rather quality that matters now. Thus it isn't unsurprising that Frontiers & MDPI, two very known open-access proponent publishers, are also very known to publishing garbage. It's ironic that once was said that any journal asking you for money to publish your paper is predatory, yet nowadays somehow this is considered best practice.
[0]: https://plos.org/fees/ [1]: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access
If researchers cannot pay the APC then PLoS often reduces the fee. Also - half of that grant money is used by the Institution as administrative overhead. An part of that overhead is paying Elsevier for journal access. If you want to decrease the cost of research that may be a better place to start.
I agree that volume often tends to result in garbage but the review is supposed to lessen that. Again that garbage did get funded some how.
I am not pushing PLoS - they are simply a publisher I am familiar with that uses this model.
The garbage thing is really interesting. I'm going to propose another reason for garbage is Academia's reliance on publication as the primary means for giving promotions and judging peoples work. This leads to all kinds of disfunction.
Was it Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs that said his University wanted to fire him because he didn't publish frequently enough?
I am a self-funded PhD student and no one paid me for the work that went into my open access paper. As it happens in this case the journal waived the publication fee, so no one paid anyone anything except I suppose the nominal pro-rata portion of my university fees that I paid.
While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.
I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.
Kidding, i agree $30-50 per article is outrageous.
The entire education system is a racket.
It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.
It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.
I wonder if we could form a graph that would make a collusion ring intuitively visible (I’m not sure what—between papers, authors, and signings—should be the edges and the nodes, though). Making these relationships explicit should help discover this kind of stuff, right?
Another problem with my idea is that a lot of famous luminaries wouldn’t bother playing the game, or are dead already. But, all we can really do is set up a game for those who’d like to play…
Profit motivated exclusivity under private control resulted in the enshittification vortex of adtech doom we're currently all drowning in. If you want prestige - top ten status in Google search results - you need to play the game they invented. Same goes for all of academia.
People stopped optimizing for good websites and utility and craft and started optimizing for keywords and technicalities and glitches in the matrix that bumped their ranking.
People stopped optimizing for beneficial novel research and started optimizing for topical grants, politically useful subjects, p hacking, and outright making shit up as long as it was valuable to the customers (grant agencies and institutions seeking particular outcomes, etc.)
Google is trash, and scientific publication is a flaming dumpster fire of reproducibility failure, fraud, politically motivated weasel wording nonsense, and profit motivated selective studies on medical topics that benefit pharma and chemical companies and the like.
Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications.
It's incredibly cheap and easy to host for free. It benefits everyone the most and harms the public the least to do it like that, and if a prestigious platform tries to push narrative bending propaganda, it can be directly and easily contradicted using the same open and public mechanisms. And if it happens in the other direction, with solid, but politically or commercially inconvenient research saying something that isn't appreciated by those with wealth or power, that research can be openly reproduced and replicated, all out in the open.
In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).
This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.
Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.
In astrophysics we already have a journal like that is gaining traction after several publishers switched to golden open access.
The system when the taxpayer subsidizes enormous profit margins of Elsevier etc while relying on free work by referees is crazy
______
† As defined in the Berlin Declaration 22 years ago: https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration
> Making the first 50 years of its publications and related content freely available expresses ACM’s commitment to open access publication and represents another milestone in our transition to full open access within the next five years.
( from https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-b... )
I wouldn't have understood that nuance without the context given by your comment, but in my developer mind I analogize "freely available" to a "source available" license that they took on, as a step towards going open access ("free and open source") over time. I'm also happy to see that that transition seems on track as planned.
I haven’t been able to find anything that states otherwise. What changes in January is the policy for new publications.
Or at least they haven’t explicitly announced anything in that vein for post-2000.
just publish your stuff in a website... on a blog, on github....
Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).
Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.
Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:
“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”
This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.
#FreeAlanTuring
It just took them 30 years :)
The ACM always said it wanted to build bridges with practitioners but paywalled journals aren't the way to do it.
I would be 100% for more green cards or a better guestworker program of some kind, but I've seen so many good people on H-1Bs twisted into knots... Like the time the startup I was working for hired a new HR head and two weeks in treated an H-1B so bad the HR person quit. I wanted to tell this guy "your skills are in demand and you could get a job across the street" but that's wasn't true.
I joined the IEEE Computer Society because it had a policy to not have a policy which I could accept.
In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials.
I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/premium
[1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."
Monetizing knowledge-work is nearly impossible if you want everyone to be rational about it. You gotta go for irrational customers like university and giant-org contracts, and that will happen here because of institutional inertia.
I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.
Why do research if you don't publish it? It's like running a farm and letting the food rot in the fields every year, nobody eating it. The value of knowledge is sharing it with others.
In a history of technology and science I read, the author pointed out that likely there have been many discoveries that, because they weren't shared outside the village, are lost to time (including because of a lack of widespread literacy). You might add the arts to that - how many great stories were lost?
But I'm not sure if it is about your IP or the whole country but I guess it the former. Who knows what the firewall god at Cloudflare does.