New deal enables authors to publish research open access without article processing charges (APCs) and gives institutions unlimited access to the ACM Digital Library.

On behalf of the UK’s higher education and research sector, Jisc has signed an open publish and read deal with ACM, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

Working closely with Jisc throughout the negotiations, ACM was transparent about its costs, which allowed the Jisc team to clearly demonstrate the good value of the deal to its members.

The agreement, which runs for 3 years until 2025, enables all affiliated authors to publish their research on a completely open access basis in the ACM Digital Library by selecting a creative commons attribution licence (CC BY) for article sharing and reuse.

This allows anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, adapt and make commercial use of the work as long as they attribute it as the author wishes.

Under the deal, the ACM will deposit copies of all published articles into the author’s university open repository. This means authors can share, re-use and re-distribute research after publication without extra costs.

The institutions that use the ACM agreement will also retain access to the ACM Digital Library. The library is a comprehensive collection of full-text articles and bibliographic records covering the fields of computing and information technology, containing 557,500 articles and 53 peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Sarah Roughley Barake, licensing portfolio specialist at Jisc, said: 

“We are thrilled to offer the sector this agreement. ACM’s openness around costs and pricing was appreciated by the negotiating team and smoothed the path to securing an agreement that is good value for our members and sustainable. This has resulted in more than 70 institutions signing up for the deal, surpassing our expectations.

“The agreement is a real boost for open access and clearly demonstrates ACM’s commitment to that process.”

Wyatt Reynolds, digital library and advertising sales director at ACM, said:

“ACM wishes to thank Jisc for their advocacy on behalf of their member institutions and for their efforts throughout the consultation process.

“We are so happy to see more than 70 institutions sign on to ACM Open, enabling affiliated researchers to publish unlimited open access articles in the Digital Library while retaining copyright to their work.

“This agreement represents a significant step forward for open access in the UK.

“We look forward to continued collaboration as we transition the Digital Library to full open access. As an independent non-profit society publisher, agreements like this are essential to our sustainability. We cannot thank Jisc and the participating institutions enough for supporting our publishing program.”

To read more about the agreement, see the ACM page of the Jisc licence subscriptions manager.