ACM Permits Authors to Post Open Access Copies of Their Own Work

Reviewed by Greg Wilson / 2016-09-09
Keywords: Editorial

I noted earlier this week that the ACM was making papers from this year's International Computing Education Research conference freely available—but only for two weeks, which isn't what anyone else means by "open access" (and is frankly ridiculous). I'm therefore grateful to Neil Brown for pointing out bullet #4 on this page, which says that authors and owners permanently hold the right to:

Post the Accepted Version of the Work on (1) the Author's home page, (2) the Owner's institutional repository, (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based, and (4) any non-commercial repository or aggregation that does not duplicate ACM tables of contents, i.e., whose patterns of links do not substantially duplicate an ACM-copyrighted volume or issue. Non-commercial repositories are here understood as repositories owned by non-profit organizations that do not charge a fee for accessing deposited articles and that do not sell advertising or otherwise profit from serving articles.

In other words, people can now post open-access copies of their papers as long as they do so on non-commercial sites. It's clear that this isn't widely known, so I'll be mailing some of the researchers who presented at ICER (and elsewhere) asking them to take advantage of it, and will post reviews here as papers become available.