30 December 2025
[Online petition]
[Original posting]
Watch this page for updates on the "Grinch" affair.
Support a good cause by signing the online petition.
27 January 2026: Sadly, the Grinch's heart has not grown three sizes, despite widespread outcry against the new paywall. If anything, the Grinch's heart has shrunk.
As of 27 January, more than 1,600 ACM members and volunteers, including several Turing Award winners, scores of Fellows, and hundreds of authors, conference organizers, and reviewers have signed the petition calling for the resoration of fully free and open access to all ACM Digital Library facilities that were locked behind a paywall in late December 2025. The facilities in question had been paid for long ago with ACM members' dues and were freely available to the public for years before the new paywall was installed.
The author of the 2020 petition that forced ACM to (reluctantly pretend to) commit to Open Access opposes the new paywall, which betrays the intentions of Open Access, and urges you to sign the new petition against the new paywall.
The paywall remains in place, and indeed has been strengthened in late January.
The Digital Library's "card catalog" (Advanced Search) and other crucial features needed to navigate the computing literature and link it into a coherent whole remain off limits to the public. Author Profile pages, which many ACM authors use as their CVs, are no longer visible to the public.
The ACM is attempting to extort monopoly rents on the intellectual heritage of computing, the literature generously donated to posterity by generations of computer scientists.
The harms of the new paywall, and the radical new policy of mass exclusion that it enforces, are widespread and severe. Fresh graduates entering a tough job market are cut off from the tools they need to keep pace with the rapidly evolving state of the art in computing. Instructors and students at nearly all community colleges are locked out, as are most government scientists, free software developers, public-interest organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, journalists, and independent researchers. ACM has thrown sand into the gears of America's engines of tech innovation, social mobility, accountability, and economic growth.
In published statements and stage-managed Q-and-A sessions, ACM leadership has attempted to distract attention away from the new paywall and the widespread opposition to it. They're trying to divide and confuse the opposition with predictable tactics such as misdirection, vague feel-good statements, and substantively meaningless token concessions.
We who favor genuine Open Access must stick to the simple instructions in the last paragraph of the anti-paywall petition: "We insist that ACM return to the right side of history by restoring fully free and open access to all DL features that have lately been paywalled."
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