DOI:10.1145/2001269.2001270
Ronald F. Boisvert and Jack W. Davidson

acm’s copyright Policy
Addressing the needs of authors, readers, and the Association.
In 2010 ACM published approximately
18,000 articles in its Digital Library (DL).
As a condition of publication, a designated

author of each of those articles is required to sign an agreement that transfers copyright to ACM. Many authors execute the transfer with little thought about what rights they are transferring, what rights they are retaining, and perhaps most importantly, why transferring copyright to ACM provides any benefits to them and to the larger computing community. Some authors view the copyright transfer as a “land grab” by ACM of their intellectual property and only grudgingly execute the transfer form. This misperception about the goals and purpose of ACM’s copyright policy sometimes appears in blogs and postings to discussion lists on academic publishing. Our intent here is to briefly highlight some key provisions of ACM’s copyright policy (the full text can be found at http://www. acm.org/publications/policies/copy-right_policy) to dispel some misperceptions, and to describe some recent changes to the policy that benefit both our authors and the Association.

Background

ACM’s original copyright policy was reformulated in 1994 specifically to address access and usage rights in the digital environment. The major principles in this landmark policy were widely adopted by other scholarly societies and eventually by commercial publishers as well.

Nonetheless, few could anticipate the rapid adoption of electronic publishing and the accompanying development of enhanced services

and functions. To keep pace with and adapt to these changes, the Publications Board continually reviews our copyright policy. These reviews consider input collected from the various stakeholders: authors, subscrib-ers, and the Association. Indeed, the reformulated policy has undergone multiple revisions over the past 17 years. The current version, Version 6, was adopted in January 2011. As part of our most recent review, the Publications Board also carried out a comparative review of our copyright policy with the copyright and licensing policies of several major scientific publishers. We did this not only to determine how ACM’s policy compared to those of its peers (we compare very favorably), but also to uncover good ideas that might be useful to incorporate in our policy.

Rights Retained by authors

Many authors assume they are giving up all rights to use their material in future works (as is common with commercial publishers) when they transfer copyright to ACM. In fact, ACM’s policy allows authors to reuse the material in their future works without restriction, without cost, and without any need to ask for permission. The complete list of rights retained by authors under ACM’s copyright transfer agreement is:

˲ ˲ All other proprietary rights to the work such as patent,

˲ ˲ The right to reuse any portion of the work, without fee, in future works of the author’s own, including books,

lectures, and presentations in all media, provided that the ACM citation and notice of the Copyright are included,

˲ ˲ The right to revise the work,

˲ ˲ The right to retain copyright to embedded images (for example, figures) with independent artistic value, ˲ ˲ The right of an employer that originally owned copyright to distribute definitive copies of its author-employ-ees work within its organization, and ˲ ˲ The right to post author-prepared versions of the work covered by ACM copyright in a personal collection on their own home page, on a publicly accessible server of their employer, and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include the ACM copyright notice both embedded within the full-text file and in the accompanying citation display as well.

The last three items deserve special comment. The right to retain copyright to embedded images with independent artistic value was a change the Publications Board adopted last January. Many of the images that appear in ACM’s computer graphics conference proceedings and journals require substantial effort to produce (both creative effort and production effort) and the authors or their companies often wish to separately exploit these images as artworks. Based on feedback from the graphics community, the Publications Board added