HN Reader

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.

The financials of open access are interesting.

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

This article about how to go from manual processes to automation is still one of the greatest ACM publications ever written:

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520

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
  * Advanced search
  * Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and citations received
  * Bulk citation exports and PDF downloads

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.

[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."

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.

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).

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!

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.

Very good and appreciated, but I think for math/CS the problem is essentially solved by virtue of having arxiv.org strongly embedded into the culture, so I consider it just a PR stunt. Thanks nevertheless.

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.

Great news, and hopefully more to come across other publications! If only aaronsw was here to see it :(

Does this kind of general shift more firmly establish a marketplace and business model for eminent "peers" to more easily create independent journals? Universities increasingly price in this pay to publish model so groups of editors could very easily corner their respective niches with independent publications if they cooperate with one another. The market is ripe for fragmentation.

Maybe this is wishful thinking but a proliferation of openly accessible and competing independent publications could correct for a lot of the ills of the Goodhart effect in academic publishing. Market shifts that make this evolutionary pathway feasible and realistic are exiting.

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.

#FreeAlanTuring

Give me a reading list! What are great publications in the ACM that one should read come January?

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.

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

Will it be retro-active? I stopped my ACM subscription after they broke their deal with access to O’Reilly platform. And if I want to access ACM in general I can use my wikpedia library credential I guess, but possibly there was things still unavailable through that partnership.

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.

Perhaps a system where the University publishes papers written by its researchers, and nobody else. That way, there is gatekeeping in the form of the University not hiring researchers who are kooks or frauds. The University's incentive would be maintaining their reputation.

i dont even understand why these things exist...

just publish your stuff in a website... on a blog, on github....

Might make me join the ACM again!

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?

This is great news!

Great news. I've bookmarked an article back in 2009 but didn't want to pay $80 for it.

Will they end up using ads? (not joking)

How is this Discords fault at all? I thought almost all bug bounties don’t apply to 3rd party services.

Many already were.

Long overdue.

I don't care, I'll keep using sci-hub.

This is good news for modern man.

wow this is wonderful news!

Now, only if IEEE would follow suit.

After ACL, now ACM set its papers free; let'S hope IEEE will be next.

Now if only the IEEE did the same…

Come on IEEE...

I get the Notice : "Your IP Address has been blocked", i am from algeria by the way, not sure why my country is blocked.

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.

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).