ACM open access is now the default, not an option: since 1 January 2026 the Association for Computing Machinery publishes all journals, conference proceedings and magazines under a fully open-access model, replacing its previous hybrid Read & Publish arrangement. Under the CC BY licence, zero-embargo release and author-retained copyright that now apply across the ACM Digital Library, the model satisfies cOAlition S’s Plan S licensing, immediacy and rights-retention requirements — closing a compliance gap that existed while ACM operated as a transformative agreement.
ACM Open is the Read & Publish framework through which participating institutions pay a fixed annual fee, based on their average publishing output over the previous three years, in exchange for unlimited open-access publishing by their corresponding authors and full institutional read access to the ACM Digital Library.
- What is ACM open access?
- What does Plan S actually require?
- Does ACM Open satisfy cOAlition S requirements?
- What happened to ACM’s transformative agreements?
- What this means for institutions and researchers
- Frequently asked questions
- Looking ahead
What is ACM open access?
As of 1 January 2026, ACM transitioned every journal, magazine and conference proceeding in the ACM Digital Library to full open access, removing the mixed subscription/hybrid model that had applied since the ACM Open programme launched in 2020. The ACM Digital Library itself was split into two tiers on the same date: a free Basic edition giving open access to ACM’s full published corpus, and a paid Premium edition adding discovery tools, usage metrics, citation management and the ACM Guide to Computing Literature.
Institutional participation still runs through ACM Open, ACM’s Read & Publish framework. Corresponding authors at a subscribing institution publish an unlimited number of open-access articles without paying an article processing charge (APC) directly; the institution instead pays one fixed annual fee tied to its historical publishing volume. Authors at non-participating institutions can still publish open access but may be liable for an APC.
What does Plan S actually require?
Plan S is the funder-driven open-access mandate coordinated by cOAlition S, a consortium of national and charitable research funders including UKRI, Wellcome and members of the European Research Council network. It sets three non-negotiable conditions for compliant publication, in force since the policy’s 2021 implementation date:
- Licensing — the published article must carry a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or an equivalent that permits free reuse, as a default condition.
- Immediacy — there can be no embargo period; the Version of Record, or an accepted manuscript carrying the same licence, must be open at the moment of publication.
- Rights retention — authors, not publishers, must retain the rights needed to comply, formalised in cOAlition S’s Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), which lets funded authors apply a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript regardless of the publisher’s own copyright terms.
cOAlition S also phased out support for hybrid and transformative-journal routes: funding for APCs in hybrid subscription journals was withdrawn after 2024, meaning publishers relying on transformative agreements needed to complete a full flip to open access to remain straightforwardly fundable under Plan S.
Does ACM Open satisfy cOAlition S requirements?
Measured against each Plan S condition, ACM’s current model clears the bar directly rather than through a transitional workaround. The table below maps ACM’s terms to the three cOAlition S requirements.
| Plan S requirement | ACM Open / ACM Digital Library position |
|---|---|
| CC BY licence by default | CC BY is the default licence under ACM Open; authors may select an alternative Creative Commons licence such as CC BY-NC-ND where a funder permits it. |
| No embargo (immediacy) | Zero embargo — the Version of Record is openly accessible in the ACM Digital Library at the point of publication for every ACM title. |
| Author/institution rights retention | ACM ceased requiring copyright transfer from authors; authors grant ACM a non-exclusive licence to publish rather than assigning copyright, satisfying the Rights Retention Strategy. |
| Sustainable, transparent cost model | ACM Open’s Read & Publish fee is fixed for the agreement term and based on three-year historical output, giving institutions a predictable APC-equivalent cost. |
The practical effect for a cOAlition S-funded computer scientist is that publishing in an ACM venue no longer requires checking whether a specific journal is “transformative” or tracking an embargo clock — the open-access, CC BY, zero-embargo position now applies uniformly across the ACM catalogue.
What happened to ACM’s transformative agreements?
Before the January 2026 flip, ACM Open operated as a transformative agreement: a Read & Publish deal under which subscription revenue was gradually redirected toward open-access publishing, with the expectation that the journal portfolio would eventually convert fully to open access. UK higher-education institutions negotiated ACM Open terms through Jisc, whose subscriptions catalogue still lists the prior “ACM OPEN Journals 2023-2025” agreement as the precursor arrangement that libraries used to budget for the transition.
ACM’s own SIGGRAPH leadership signalled the scale of this shift well in advance: in a June 2024 community Q&A, ACM SIGGRAPH chair Jonathan Aldrich stated that ACM anticipated 60-65% or more of authors would already be covered by institutional open-access agreements by the time of the full transition, with the remainder needing an author-paid or waiver route. That anticipated coverage gap is precisely what the January 2026 full flip was designed to close, since every article — not just those from ACM Open institutions — is now open access regardless of the author’s institutional agreement status.
What this means for institutions and researchers
For research administrators tracking funder compliance, ACM’s flip removes a recurring due-diligence step: computer-science output published with ACM no longer needs an individual title-by-title check against a cOAlition S-approved transformative journal list, because the requirement is now met at the publisher level. Institutions still weighing whether to join ACM Open should note that the Read & Publish fee is separate from open-access compliance itself — declining to subscribe does not make an ACM article closed, but it may shift APC liability onto individual authors or their grants.
For authors publishing under UKRI, Horizon Europe or other cOAlition S-aligned funder mandates, the practical takeaway is that ACM venues can now be selected on scholarly merit without a separate compliance audit — a meaningful simplification for research administrators supporting authors across computing, information systems and related interdisciplinary fields.
Frequently asked questions
What is ACM open access?
ACM open access refers to ACM’s publishing model, under which, as of January 2026, all ACM journals, conference proceedings and magazines are freely accessible with no reader-side subscription barrier. Authors retain copyright and publish under a CC BY licence by default, typically funded through their institution’s ACM Open Read & Publish agreement rather than a per-article fee.
Is ACM open access free for readers?
Yes. The ACM Digital Library’s Basic edition gives free, open-access reading of ACM’s full published corpus. A separate paid Premium edition exists, but it adds discovery and analytics tools rather than gating access to the research articles themselves.
Does ACM’s open-access model satisfy Plan S?
Yes. ACM’s default CC BY licence, zero-embargo release of the Version of Record, and author rights retention policy together meet all three of cOAlition S’s core Plan S conditions, without relying on a transformative-agreement exception.
What licence does ACM Open use?
ACM Open’s default licence is CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution), which permits free reuse with attribution and satisfies cOAlition S’s licensing requirement. Authors may request an alternative Creative Commons licence, such as CC BY-NC-ND, where their funder’s terms allow it.
Looking ahead
ACM’s move puts one of computing’s two dominant scholarly publishers — alongside IEEE, which retains a hybrid subscription model for most titles — fully inside the Plan S compliance perimeter without caveats. For funders and institutions monitoring discipline-specific open-access uptake, ACM’s flip is a useful signal that field-specific societies can complete a full transition to open access while keeping a Read & Publish fee structure recognisable to library budgets. Research administrators supporting computer-science authors should update internal compliance checklists to reflect that ACM no longer requires case-by-case verification against transformative-journal criteria.