publications board letter
DOI: 10.1145/1409360.1409361 Ronald F. Boisvert and Holly Rushmeier
acm Publications:
access and sustainability
The dissemination of research results and other technical
information is one of the primary ways in which ACM
carries out its mission as an educational and scientific
society. As such, ACM seeks to make its publications
accessible to as wide an audience as
possible. However, in doing so ACM
also has a responsibility to its members,
as well as to the profession at large, to
ensure that its publications program is
sustainable far into the future. Balanc-
ing these sometimes competing goals
has always been a challenge. It hasn’t
gotten easier in the digital age.
The centerpiece of the ACM publi-
cations program is the ACM Digital Li-
brary (DL) and its associated Guide to
Computing Literature. Through these
outlets, ACM provides free access to the
metadata of over 240,000 articles that
ACM publishes, as well as to more than
one million bibliographic citations to
the computing literature at large. The
acm also has
a responsibility
to its members,
as well as to the
profession at large,
to ensure that its
publications program
is sustainable far
into the future.
metadata ACM provides is extremely
rich, containing forward citations, click-
able references, unique author biblio-
graphic pages, along with citation and
download counts.
ACM supports the desires of individ-
ual authors to make their work univer-
sally available by posting the accepted
(uncopyedited) versions of their articles
on their own Web site or institutional
site. Thanks to the very effective index-
ing provided by Web search engines,
this, in effect, provides significant free
and open access to the latest results of
computing research.
A large modern professional publish-
ing program does incur expenses, how-
ever. For example, ACM provides access
to professionally developed tools for
tracking submissions and reviews, paid
administrative assistants for editors,
professional copyediting of journal ar-
ticles, as well as development and over-
sight of the publishing program itself,
including investigation and redress of
charges of plagiarism.
ACM’s commitment to sustained,
long-term access to its publications
rests with its DL. Support of this archi-
val library, including clean metadata,
search mechanisms, high-performance
data server development and mainte-
nance, as well as preparation for migra-
tion to future data formats, also incurs
significant cost.
To help recover these costs, access to
the full text of the definitive versions of
articles published in the ACM DL does
require a subscription. As a non-profit,
ACM is committed to hold the costs to
the community at a very low level. This
is accomplished by close attention to
providing highly cost-effective internal
operations, which are supported by the
volunteer effort of ACM reviewers and
editors.
ACM has thus far elected to use sub-
scriptions rather than an “author pays”
model to support the publishing pro-
gram. In a discipline where much re-
search is not supported by large grants
and is not performed at large institu-
tions, requiring authors to bear the
expense of the publications program
would shut out important segments of
the community and severely impair re-
search progress.
ACM’s low prices for access to its DL
have enabled wide availability (currently
over 2,500 libraries worldwide). In addi-
tion, ACM facilitates access to its litera-
ture around the world through a pricing
structure that is adjusted to individual’s
status (such as, professional vs. student)
and geographic location.
ACM continues its commitment to
keeping the barriers to access of ACM’s
research publications as low as possible
subject to its responsibility to sustain
long-term accessibility and growth. We
will continue to track new publishing
models and developments in our quest
to provide the best service to ACM mem-
bers and the community at large.
Ronald F. Boisvert
Holly Rushmeier
