The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest and oldest society of computing professionals, has transitioned its entire portfolio to 100% Open Access on 1 January 2026. This marks a major milestone for the global computing and information science community. By making all ACM publications openly available, the move is expected to widen access to knowledge, reduce inequalities in participation, and strengthen reproducibility and interdisciplinary research.
To learn more about the motivations behind the decision and what it means for researchers worldwide, we spoke with ACM President Yannis Ioannidis, who is also one of the founding members of OpenAIRE AMKE, the coordinator of all the initiative’s projects beforehand, a professor of informatics and telecommunications at the University of Athens, and an associated faculty member at Athena Research Center.
Can you introduce yourself and your role in relation to ACM’s transition to Open Access?
I have been involved with ACM since I was a student and had the honour of being elected president in 2022 and then re-elected for a second term, which I am now serving.
Discussions about Open Access within ACM began before my presidency. In 2020, the ACM Council decided that the organisation would transition to full Open Access within five years. Before that decision, I had already been engaged in Open Access at the European level for many years and had interacted with ACM on issues such as green Open Access.
Since becoming president, my role has been to support the implementation of that decision, and to contribute my experience from OpenAIRE and European Open Science policy. It has been a privilege to be an active participant of ACM’s move forward with a change that benefits our entire community.
What were the main challenges in bringing about this change?
The biggest challenge was cultural, not technical.
Some members asked: “Why change something that already works?” The answer is simple: it does not work for everyone.
While many researchers in well-funded institutions can afford subscription access, many others around the world cannot. Also, current models often mean taxpayers pay twice, once to fund research and then another to read it.
Open Access allows public investment in research to benefit everyone.
There is also a strong practical argument: open publications are read and cited more, accelerate innovation, and support reproducibility. Recent studies, including work under the PathOS project, show economic benefits as well.
Once these ethical and practical points were recognised, most people were convinced.
Why is this transition important for the computing and information science community?
Computing today sits at the centre of almost all scientific activity and is essential for interdisciplinary research. In many areas, research is now predominantly computational by nature. Recent examples of strong evidence include Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry that were entirely or largely connected to AI methods.
Therefore, making ACM publications fully Open Access will not only increase the flow of knowledge across disciplines and enable researchers in other fields to build on computing innovation, but also support computing’s central role in Open Science.
It would be inconsistent for computing to keep its own research closed while it is a key facilitator of Open Science in many other disciplines. This step aligns practice with principle.
How will ACM’s move to full Open Access affect scholarly communication within computer science?
When the largest computing society becomes openly available, this creates a splash. And everyone is watching.
We are not only going 100% Open Access but also introducing a distinctive business model, ACM Open, that shifts the burden away not only from readers but many individual authors as well.
ACM Open allows institutions or even countries to pay a flat annual fee that allows all affiliated authors to publish without additional cost. Authors only pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) when not institutionally covered.
More than 3,000 institutions worldwide already participate in ACM Open. For those not yet included, APCs apply from January 2026, but ACM has reduced its already low charges significantly during at least the first few years of the transition.
Our goal is simple: remove barriers to publish and to read, while keeping the model sustainable. If this succeeds, and I strongly believe it will, it will set an example for the rest of the publishing ecosystem in computer science.
What opportunities does 100% Open Access create for early-career researchers or those without strong funding?
The benefits here are profound. Researchers in under-resourced institutions often lack access to comprehensive digital libraries.
- anyone, anywhere can read ACM publications
- early-career researchers enter the field on more equal footing
- reproducibility becomes easier when publications, data, and software are openly available
Open Access removes not only technical barriers, but also social ones. A familiar scenario in research is a scholar contacting the authors of a paper to request data, code, or additional details. In many cases, no information ever arrives. This can happen for many reasons: the files are in an old inaccessible computer, the graduate student who created them has moved on, or there is simply no reply. Furthermore, sometimes, whether a response comes depends on who is asking: researchers from lesser-known institutions may be less likely to receive an answer.
Openness reduces these inequalities.
How will this change influence norms around data sharing, software availability, and reproducibility?
In most areas of computing, ACM conferences and journals are regarded as leading venues for publishing high-quality research. When such a central organisation moves fully Open Access, it sends a signal.
If the community sees that:
- full openness works
- high-quality venues remain strong
- impact increases
Then other societies and publishers will feel pressure to follow. ACM is taking a calculated risk, but one we believe that is on the right side of history and that we will succeed in.
Leadership matters: when major organisations change, the rest of the community moves with them.
Has Open Access influenced your own work?
Having become a believer from early on, Open Access has shaped my publishing behaviour. I make an effort to choose OA venues, deposit work in institutional repositories, and support infrastructures such as OpenAIRE, to the point that I have invested a significant part of my professional time in coordinating its development.
However, there is a lack of easy tools to track exactly how openness affects the impact of my own publications. This highlights the need for projects such as PathOS and services like OpenAIRE’s MyResearchFolio (currently under development), helping researchers and the community understand and demonstrate the impact of openness.
What has been the influence of OpenAIRE on ACM, and how do you see future collaboration?
I am a different person before and after OpenAIRE! It has deeply influenced the way I think about Open Access. Consequently, given my leadership roles in both organisations, it has clearly shaped my own contribution within ACM.
Beyond that, however, looking ahead, there are strong opportunities for more systematic collaboration as well, including:
- combining institutional repositories and ACM publications
- improving harvesting between the ACM Digital Library and the OpenAIRE Graph
- sharing services that benefit the wider research community
Both organisations play complementary roles in the Open Science ecosystem, and closer cooperation will benefit the global computing community.
ACM’s transition to full Open Access represents a major shift in how computing research will be shared and built upon. With new business models, reduced barriers to participation, and a strong emphasis on reproducibility, this change has the potential to reshape scholarly communication within and beyond computer science. As ACM moves forward and collaboration with initiatives such as OpenAIRE deepens, the global research community will be evolving in its ways and benefiting from broader access to knowledge.
