Communications - October 2011

the ability for authors to selectively retain copyright to such images.

The rights addressed by the last two items have always been somewhat controversial in the community. That is not surprising as these items expose the tension between ACM providing a means for free and open access to every article and sustaining a robust, publishing program with subscription revenue. This tension was noted in David Wise’s June 1999 Communications article that described the Publications Board rationale for granting these rights (see http://dx.doi.

org/10.1145/303849.303870).

In fact, as a not-for-profit professional society, ACM has priced its DL subscriptions at the low end of the spectrum for commercial and nonprofit society publishers alike. The result is the DL is now available at some 3,000 academic, government, and industrial sites in 75 countries, accounting for an estimated 15− 20

million persons with potential access.

For calendar year 2011 we are projecting approximately 15 million full-text downloads by 1. 5 million active users.

So, the “pay wall” erected by subscriptions is not a barrier to the vast majority of research scientists. And, the subscription revenues contribute to DL services that are free to the community at large, such as the DL’s embedded

Guide to Computing Literature, a free, discipline-specific discovery service that indexes the top research publications of the entire field, with Web pages that aggregate citation and usage data in profiles for individual authors, conferences, and institutions.

ACM continues to look for ways in which it can strike an even better balance between open access and the need to generate revenues to extend and sustain its editorial services, databases, and servers. One new feature that ACM will roll out in the fall will enable authors to obtain a special link for any of their ACM articles that they may post on their personal page. Anyone who clicks on this link can freely download the definitive version of the paper from the DL. In addition, authors will receive a code snippet they can put on their Web page that will display up-to-date citation counts and download statistics for their article from the DL.

for calendar
year 2011
we are projecting
roughly 15 million
full-text downloads
by 1. 5 million
active users.
so, the “pay wall”
erected by
subscriptions
is not a barrier
to the vast
majority of
research scientists.

This referrer-linking service has major benefits for our authors and for the ACM DL. First, it provides free access to the definitive version of the article permanently maintained by ACM in the DL, enabled by the authors through their home-page bibliography. There will no longer be a need to post author-prepared versions. The benefit to the author and ACM is that download statistics maintained and reported by the DL will be more complete as they will reflect activity of users accessing the article from the author’s home page, and automatic indexers will point to the article in the DL rather than non-definitive copies hosted elsewhere without any promise of being permanently maintained.

Benefits of copyright transfer

One might wonder, given the generous rights retained by authors, why ACM requires authors to transfer copyright to ACM at all. In fact, the transfer of copyright to ACM provides substantial benefit to the computing research community and to authors.

By owning exclusive publication
rights to articles, ACM is able to de-
velop salable publication products
that sustain its top-quality publishing
programs and services; ensure access
to organized collections by current
and future generations of readers;
and invest continuously in new titles
and in services like referrer-linking,
profiling, and metrics, which serve
the community. Furthermore, it al-
lows ACM to efficiently clear rights
for the creation, dissemination, and
translation of collections of articles
that benefit the computing commu-
nity that would be impossible if in-
dividual authors or their heirs had to
be contacted for permission. Owner-
ship of copyright allows ACM to pur-
sue cases of plagiarism. The number
of these handled has been steadily
growing; some 20 cases were handled
by ACM in the last year. Having ACM
investigate and take action removes
this burden from our authors, and
ACM is more likely to obtain a satis-
factory outcome (for example, having
the offending material removed from
a repository) than an individual.

conclusion

ACM’s policies regarding author rights, reuse permissions, and copyright transfer, coupled with its business model offering multiple access paths to content—some of them free of charge—and a commitment to keep subscription prices for both individuals and institutions very low—all combine to maximize wide distribution of ACM publications and global access to them. As part of its continued stewardship of this resource, ACM will continue to seek input from its stakeholders and adapt its policies to improve the experience of both the authors that generate content and the many users that access this content.