Original: 23 December 2025
Updated: 30 December 2025
[Online petition]
[Updates]
In recent days the ACM Digital Library has revoked free public access to useful features including bibliometric data and author profiles. This change contradicts the spirit of "ACM Open," the vaunted transformation of ACM publications to "full open access," and harms readers, authors, computing research, and the computing profession as a whole. Perhaps those responsible for the change hope that it will go unnoticed during the holiday season and will be accepted as a fait accompli in the new year.
Below I explain how you, your colleagues, and our community are harmed by the paywalling of previously free-and-open Digital Library features. Then I tell you what you can do to reverse this unwelcome, unwise, and frankly appalling change.
For the past several years, the ACM Digital Library (DL) has offered, free of charge, several features based on bibliographic and bibliometric data. Citation counts and download counts on every article in the DL enabled anyone to gauge the impact of ACM publications. Readers of a particular publication could find all subsequent articles that cite it, which helps readers to keep pace with a rapidly changing field. Author Profile pages collected the complete works of individual authors, sparing writers the chore of maintaining and publishing this information themselves and making it easy for readers to find the complete works of their favorite authors.
Starting on or about Saturday 20 December 2025, the DL has placed all of these useful features behind a paywall. "Premium Access" is now required to access bibliographic and bibliometric features that had been completely free and open for the past several years. A small fraction of the computing community inherits premium access from posh employers that have purchased it at the institutional level, but enormous numbers of students, computing professionals, and employers have been shut out.
I have worked closely with the ACM in recent years and I'm in
frequent contact with several ACM Fellows and ACM insiders, including
editors at two major ACM publications. Everyone with whom I have
discussed the matter to date has been surprised by the new paywall;
none of us saw this coming. The plan that ACM has trumpeted in
recent years has been the removal of impediments to free and
open access. Quoting from www.acm.org:
Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, more discoverable, and more reusable. .... ACM is grateful for the community’s consistent advocacy for openness and its commitment to ensuring that computing knowledge is shared widely.
The unprecedented move of revoking public access to crucial DL features is the antithesis of openness. Perhaps that's why this lump of coal was dropped into our stocking during the winter holidays, when most of those harmed are distracted by upcoming vacations.
Every computer scientist and every programmer knows that metadata is what makes data useful and valuable. Or, as a vandal would put it, there's no need to burn a library; burning the card catalog is sufficient.
Without bibliographic and bibliometric metadata, the value of the DL's raw data (the publications themselves) is greatly reduced. Concealing from readers the web of citations that connect the computing literature into a cohesive whole is a tremendous disservice and the last thing that any public-spirited library would ever consider doing.
Authors are hit especially hard by the paywall. Recognition and archiving are the only compensation they receive for the toil of writing articles. Until recently, that was the social contract: Authors filled the ACM Digital Library by donating high-quality articles; in return, the DL made it easy for readers, scholars, and prospective employers to find those articles, associate them with their authors, and appraise their impact. In recent days this social contract has been unilaterally voided.
Until a few days ago, Author Profile pages in the DL served as curricula vitae. Author Profile pages made it easy for anyone to peruse an author's list of publications. Author Profile pages also made it easy for authors to organize and publicize their work, which the DL summarized in a single stable URL. Now, however, Author Profile pages viewed outside the paywall contain very little information; the author's full publication list is not shown. If you've devoted much of your career to writing for ACM, your CV has been redacted so severely that it has essentially been destroyed. If you trusted ACM and the DL to make your work freely available and give you the recognition that you have earned, your trust has been betrayed.
This betrayal might hurt the next time you're on the job market. Prospective employers who haven't forked over money for Premium Access to the DL can no longer gauge the impact of your contributions by checking the popularity and citations of your articles at the ACM DL.
The saddest aspect of the new paywall is that it won't accomplish its intended purpose. It won't raise ACM revenue by arm-twisting readers into buying Premium Access. The paywall will frustrate and alienate readers, and it will anger ACM members and authors, but as a means of petty extortion it will fail.
Start by complaining. Remind the folks responsible for the paywall that readers respond to such restrictions by going away, not by paying. If you're an ACM Member, remind them that you've already paid for the features they've revoked, insist that these features must be restored, and say that you'll revisit the matter the next time you must decide whether to renew your membership. If you're an ACM author, tell them how you feel when your CV is redacted. If you're an ACM volunteer, remind them that their salaries depend on your unpaid labor.
ACM authors and volunteers (reviewers, editors, etc.), please cc: me. I'll organize a protest, and, if necessary, a strike. ACM exists to serve computing professionals and the DL exists to serve readers. ACM must restore full and free open access to all bibliographic and bibliometric features that have lately been paywalled, or it risks losing the volunteer support that makes ACM and the DL possible.
Terence Kelly <tpkelly@eecs.umich.edu>
ACM Distinguished Member and Lifetime Member
Chair, Practice Section, Communications of the ACM
https://dl.acm.org/profile/81100523747