Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Open Access Model Pilot Agreement
Guest Blogger: Qianjin “Marina” Zhang
In November 2020, the University of Iowa (UI) Libraries participated in a transformative open access model agreement with ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, as the first Big Ten Academic Alliance Library. Under the agreement, UI corresponding authors can choose to retain copyright and make all articles and conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library open access immediately at no cost to the author. Now, the UI Libraries are paying ACM a single fee to cover both open access publication costs in ACM’s journals, conference proceedings and magazines for all UI corresponding authors, along with subscription access. The agreement runs from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2023, and applies to all submissions by UI corresponding authors during that period. UI faculty, students, staff, researchers, and community members physically present on campus also continue to receive unlimited and unrestricted access to all content in the ACM Digital Library. Through participation in this transformative agreement, UI has expanded the universe of readers and the scholarly impact of UI authors.
Workflow for making articles open access with ACM
Upon acceptance of a journal article or conference paper, UI corresponding authors will receive an email that says, “We are pleased to inform you that University of Iowa Libraries has an agreement with ACM under which all affiliated corresponding authors can make their article Open Access at no additional cost.”
The email includes a link to the ACM Open Author eRights form. The default and recommended choice from available rights offerings is “Permission Release”. This means that “Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work can choose ACM’s non-exclusive permission to publish where you will have an option to display a Creative Commons license on your work in the ACM Digital Library”.
Upon selection of license options, there is a Creative Commons (CC BY) license, no CC license and CC0 license. Creative Commons licenses enable you to retain copyright while allow others to use your work with your permission under copyright law, especially how you would like others to use your work. For example, do you allow remixing, for commercial use, or require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original work? No CC license means that you do not expressly grant others any permission to use your work. In contrast to CC BY licenses, CC0 license which is also called “no rights reserved” enables you as owner of copyright or database protected content to waive all the owner’s rights, so that others may freely reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law. Therefore, a CC BY license is recommended because it allows you to retain certain rights as well as others to build up, enhance and reuse your work for academic purposes.
Following submission of the eRights form, the author will receive email confirmation of the acceptance of the forms along with a copy for their records.
Please note that authors must use their institutional email address to be routed to the ACM Open program.
Any questions or concerns, please email Marina Zhang, Engineering & Informatics Librarian, at qianjin-zhang@uiowa.edu
References:
https://libguides.wustl.edu/sc/ACM-OPEN
https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/oa-publishing-support/acm-agreement/
https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/acm-transformative-oa-agreement/
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/
https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/acmopen