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UW Joins ACM Transformative Open Access Agreement

UW joins over a hundred other institutions participating in the ACM Open agreement.

Starting January 2022 the University of Washington (UW) entered into a transformative open access agreement with ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery. UW joins over a hundred other institutions participating in the ACM Open agreement. Under this agreement research articles by UW corresponding authors in all ACM journals, conference proceedings, and magazines will be made open access immediately at no cost to the author.

In 2020, UW ranked third in the world for institutions publishing research in ACM Digital Library publications. This agreement will allow all of those articles going forward to be made available open access supporting not just UW authors but researchers around the world.

About the agreement

This agreement allows UW corresponding authors to make all of their research articles in the ACM Digital Library open access immediately at no cost to the author. Under the default workflow process, authors will retain copyright and may select a Creative Commons license for sharing and reuse of the work. ACM will automatically deposit a copy of all UW-authored research articles into the ResearchWorks repository managed by the UW Libraries. This automatic deposit includes articles for which the UW author is not the corresponding author.

UW students, faculty, and staff will continue to have unlimited and unrestricted access to all the content (open access and paywalled) included with the standard ACM Digital Library subscription.

ACM is transitioning from its traditional subscription business model, where ACM content is only available to subscribers and subscribing institutions. With ACM Open, a transformative open access model, publishing costs are paid by the institutions whose authors publish articles in  ACM journals, magazines and conference proceedings.

In addition, the UW Libraries pays a single fee that covers the open access publishing costs and the subscription access to the ACM Digital Library. UW corresponding authors are no longer responsible for article-level payments for open access publishing. The fee for UW Libraries is substantially higher than the previous subscription because UW authors publish more with ACM each year than almost any other institution in the world. Support for the transition to the open access model was made possible by funding from a Provost Reinvestment Fund to support Open Access Transformational agreements and increasing the open access publishing by UW authors.

Corresponding UW authors submitting research articles for publication should be sure to use their “uw.edu” email address in ACM’s online forms to ensure their article/s will be identified as eligible for the ACM Open program.

For questions or more information contact: SustainableScholarship@uw.edu

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