In January 2020, the University of California (UC) entered into a transformative open access agreement with ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, alongside several other partner institutions (Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Iowa State University). The agreement, which runs for three years beginning January 1, 2020, covers open access publication in ACM’s journals, proceedings and magazines for all UC corresponding authors (as well as authors from any of the other participating institutions), along with subscription access.
Through participation in this transformative agreement, the four universities are transitioning their annual library subscription fees for ACM to open access publishing fees. In doing so, they have expanded the universe of readers and the scholarly impact of their authors by making their ACM-published articles open immediately upon publication.
Agreement Basics
This agreement enables UC corresponding authors to make all articles and conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library open access immediately at no cost to the author. Instead, UC is paying ACM a single bulk fee to cover both article publication costs and subscription access. Authors who elect open access may select a Creative Commons license for article sharing and reuse.
The agreement’s open access provisions apply retroactively to any articles published by a UC corresponding author since the beginning of 2019; as the agreement is implemented, procedures will be put in place to convert these articles to open access.
In addition, all UC corresponding authors can choose to retain copyright in their articles regardless of open access status, and ACM will automatically deposit a copy of all UC-authored articles, including those for which the UC author is not the corresponding author, into the UC repository eScholarship.
UC faculty and students also continue to receive unlimited and unrestricted access to all content (open access and paywalled) in the ACM Digital Library.
UC Payment for Open Access
Through this agreement, no article-level payments are necessary to make articles from UC corresponding authors open access in the ACM Digital Library; instead the UC libraries are paying a single fee to cover both subscription access and open access publication costs. There should be no charge to UC authors, so if you do receive an email with an invoice, simply reply to the email and reference the UC/ACM open access arrangement.
