Skip to Main Content

Open Access Publishing: ACM

The Glucksman Library's guide to assist researchers to publish their work Open Access

IReL, the Irish Research eLibrary consortium, has entered into a transformative open access agreement with ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery.  The agreement will provide unlimited and unrestricted access to ACM Digital Library for staff and students in IReL institutions during the term of the agreement (1st January 2023 - 31st December 2025). All publications from corresponding authors from IReL institutions (including  UL) published during the term in ACM journals, conference proceedings and magazines will be made Open Access at the time of publication at no cost to the authors. ACM will also automatically upload copies of open access publications by eligible authors from IReL institutions who are not the corresponding authors to IReL members’ institutional repositories. 

Who is eligible for the ACM Open Access Publishing option?

All corresponding authors from IReL institutions (including UL)  may choose to have their research articles published Open Access in ACM journals, conference proceedings and magazines, in perpetuity at the time of publication at no cost to the authors.

The corresponding author is the person responsible for manuscript submission and all correspondence/communication during the publication process.

What is the procedure for Open Access Publishing with ACM?

When submitting a manuscript, the corresponding author must be affiliated with UL (or another IReL institution) to be included under the agreement.

During the manuscript submission process you must correctly identify your institution (UL) and you must use your UL institutional email address, not addresses from other domains. For example: you should use myname@ul.ie, not myname@lero.ie or myname@gmail.com.

Upon submission, authors will be presented with three publication options:

  1. Institutionally Paid Open Access (CC-BY open access) – the default option we recommend 
  2. Closed Access with Exclusive Licence to Publish  / Licence 
  3. Closed Access with copyright transfer 

What journals are covered

Approximately 10,000 journals are covered by IReL agreements.  IReL have created a google doc that is updated regularly with all the journal titles covered by this agreement

Columns G and H of the linked spreadsheet will also give an indication if a fund is due to run out before the year end and the projected date it will run out. 

What period is covered by the agreement?

The ACM OPEN agreement covers articles submitted between January 1st 2020 and December 31st 2022.

This means that if you submitted your article before January 1st 2020, regardless of whether it was accepted after January 1st, it will not be covered by the ACM OPEN agreement. Equally, if you submit your article on December 31st 2022 it will be covered, even if the article is accepted after that date.