ACM Open TA/Read & Publish Agreement (2025-2029)
Overview
Effective March 2025, WPI will enter a 5-year agreement with ACM to join ACM Open. ACM Open is ACM’s plan to flip all ACM publications to Open Access as of January 1 2026. The new ACM Open business model combines access to the ACM Digital Library AND APC coverage for corresponding authors. The model pays up front for unlimited OA publishing by affiliates of WPI, moving away from a "per article" author-paid APC transaction model.
This is NOT a cost-neutral model. The annual cost is approximately 5 times the previous subscription rate for the Digital Library. Associated WPI departments that publish heavily in ACM publications will provide the funding for the "publish" portion of this model (i.e. APC charges/fees).
The new pricing paid by WPI is based on ACM’s ten-tier system, which is based on the average number of articles published by corresponding authors affiliated with an institution over the most recent three years.
Once assigned a tier and a related tier price, the institution pays a fixed annual price, which covers both the Open Access publication of an unlimited number of articles from that institution and unlimited Read Access to the entire contents of the ACM Digital Library.
If requested, ACM will also make automatic deposits of all articles affiliated with that institution into the institution's Institutional Repository (IR).
Eligibility
An accepted manuscript is eligible for ACM OPEN when the corresponding author’s primary affiliation is one that currently participates in ACM OPEN. The corresponding author is tasked with completing the ACM assignment of rights and permissions on behalf of their co-authors. The corresponding author designation must be made in the conference or journal submission system and the corresponding author must include their primary affiliation and use their institutional email address. The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the majority of their work was done. If an author has subsequently moved, the current address may additionally be stated. ACM will not update or change addresses after publication of the article.
The definition that ACM uses for APC-eligible articles is any of the following article types published in any ACM Publication (i.e. journals, magazines, conference proceedings, etc.):
License
Following transmission of the manuscript to ACM production, the corresponding author will be asked to complete the assignment of rights and permissions on the ACM eRights form. It is on this form that the corresponding author may select the rights to be granted and their choice of Creative Commons license. Following submission of the eRights form, the corresponding author’s choices are logged with ACM and the appropriate rights statement is applied to the manuscript prior to publication.
Authors will be given three options, as follows:
More Information
For detailed information, see: