By Yeo Pin Pin, Head, Research Services
As of 1 January 2026, all ACM publications and related artefacts in the ACM Digital Library are open access. You no longer need an institutional subscription simply to read ACM papers.
However, publication costs still need to be covered. Since ACM articles are now published open access by default, the closed-access option is no longer available. For eligible SMU corresponding authors, any applicable APC is covered by SMU's ACM Open agreement. Authors who are not covered by an ACM Open agreement may need to pay an APC, unless they qualify for a waiver.
ACM states that this change "reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, discoverable, and reusable."
SMU membership in ACM Open deal and its benefits
SMU has been a participating member of ACM Open deal since January 2023 and this brings the following benefits to the SMU Community.
Publishing in ACM
Under this arrangement, publications where an SMU author is the corresponding author are made open access to ACM Digital Library at no cost to the author. As a result, between 2023 and 2025, 125 SMU publications were made open access through this route. For details on eligibility, see New publishing deal: Free open access publishing with ACM.
Premium research tools
While reading access is now universal, our subscription also gives you access to ACM Digital Library Premium, which goes well beyond reading articles.
This includes:
- ACM Guide to Computing Literature — an index covering content from more than 8,000 publishers, not just ACM's own. For instance, you can search for articles from the Journal of Machine Learning Research through this service.
- Advanced discovery tools — AI-assisted search, bulk downloads, and citation management to speed up your literature reviews.
- Research impact tracking — article usage metrics, citation trends, Altmetric data, and author and institutional profiles to help you understand and demonstrate your research impact.
As an example of access to the Guide to Computing Literature, you can now search for articles in the Journal of Machine Learning Research in ACM Digital Library Premium.
For AI tools, as an example there is AI summary of a paper.
There are podcast-style interviews synthesizing the papers within a conference session for recent conferences. For example, for SIGGRAPH Asia 2025.
SMU institutional profile in ACM shows metrics like average citations per article and average downloads per article.
Try out the new features in ACM Digital Library and if you are the corresponding author of a paper accepted by ACM you can publish the paper open access without additional charges.
Access ACM Digital Library
Conclusion
In short, anyone can now read ACM papers for free. But as an SMU researcher, you get two things others do not: free open access publishing in ACM venues and premium tools for discovery and impact tracking. Both are provided through SMU Libraries' investment in the ACM Open programme on your behalf.
