ACM Publications Finances for 2023 and 2024

In 2020, ACM embarked on a five-year journey to become a fully open access publisher, relying heavily on the newly launched ACM Open model to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of ACM’s Publications program and to enable the vast majority of ACM authors around the world to publish their work with ACM without being required to pay any article processing charges (APCs).

As part of ACM’s transition to open access, ACM committed to publish an overview of its Publications-related finances to provide the computing community and ACM’s institutional customers with transparency and insight into the financial impact of this transition. Over the past five years, ACM has published four articles detailing 2019-2022 calendar-year financials.

In this article, we provide 2023 and 2024 data in a consolidated report. When looking at the numbers, it’s important to keep several things in mind:

1. In these articles we report Publications-related finances by calendar year, even though ACM operates on a July-June fiscal year, so these numbers will differ from other ACM financial reports based on ACM’s fiscal year. We report on a calendar-year basis in these articles because the vast majority of Publications-related income (Table 1) is based on ACM Open and ACM Digital Library (DL) licenses, which primarily operate on a calendar-year cycle.

2. ACM provides a wide range of benefits and services to the global computing community beyond its role as a leading scholarly publisher. As a non-profit, ACM operates as a lean organization with many staff members involved in multiple aspects of the organization, including Publications, Special Interest Groups and Conferences, Membership, Educational Programs, Programs for Practitioners in Industry, Public Policy Programs, and other initiatives. When calculating expenses such as overhead staff and expenses for these articles, ACM’s Finance team included an allocation of expenses for staff working outside the Publications Department on Publications-related work. This is necessary for any organization that does more than publications to provide an accurate picture of the total income and expenses of ACM’s Publications program and to be able to compare ACM as a scholarly publisher against other scholarly publishers in the market.

Theme 1: ACM Open Model Growth

One of the major themes of the past two years is the significant growth of the ACM Open model, as ACM has moved closer to completing the transition to 100% open access publication. As of January 2023, approximately 400 institutions had joined ACM Open, and by the end of December 2024 approximately 1,670 institutions had joined. As of the writing of this article, more than 1,850 institutions were participating in ACM Open.

Historically, there have been approximately 2,600 universities, corporations, and government institutions subscribing to the ACM Digital Library. In 2019, ACM generated approximately $20.2M in Digital Library subscription income. By the end of 2024, approximately 70% of institutions subscribing to the ACM DL had migrated to ACM Open, generating approximately $15.3M. By the end of 2024, more than 750 institutions had subscribed to the ACM DL, representing approximately $6.4M for a combined total of $21.7M. This represents approximately 1.41% annual growth during the period 2019–2024. Looking more broadly at all ACM Publications income from 2019–2024, the annual growth rate has averaged only 1.00%, well below inflation for this period.

Taking the above numbers into account, it’s reasonable to ask why income growth has been so slow? The answer is related to the following:

1. ACM made the decision to not increase ACM Open tier prices during the five-year transition to 100% open access. As more institutions have migrated from Digital Library Read licenses to ACM Open licenses over the past five years, this limited the income growth ACM could realize from its institutional customers. At the same time, ACM lowered the price for small institutions that publish relatively few articles with ACM as more and more of ACM’s published content sits in front of the DL subscription paywall. In addition, ACM has intentionally kept DL “read only” pricing relatively low, despite the impact of rising inflation on expenses, while commercial publishers have been more aggressive in price increases for the institutional library market.

2. Income from other sources, such as advertising and print subscriptions, declined over the past five years due to market conditions and the sunsetting of print journals.

3. APC income declined between 2021–2023 in connection with the growth of ACM Open. As more institutions joined ACM Open during this period with affiliated authors who had been paying optional APCs in previous years, the total APC income decreased. In addition, ACM returned the vast majority of this income to institutions renewing their ACM DL or ACM Open licenses during this period, and an increasing amount of this income was used to cover costs associated with ACM’s Gold OA journals. At the end of 2023, ACM sunset this policy, which explains the significant increase in APC income in 2024.

ACM has moved closer to completing the transition to 100% open access publication … As of the writing of this article, more than 1,850 institutions were participating in ACM Open.

Theme 2: Rising Expenses

While income remained largely flat over the past five years, expenses rose significantly. In 2019, total expenses were $23,301,221. By the end of 2024, expenses had risen to $28,854,059 for an annual growth rate of 4.38% during this same period.

As you can see in Table 2, during this period ACM experienced a significant increase in expenses for:

• Journals and Proceedings-related expenses

• Digital Library Platform and Network-related expenses

• Subscription Agency-related expenses

While ACM has continued to drive down the average cost per published article during this period by improving financial terms with production vendors and publication service providers, overall expenses have continued to increase, with the most significant increase of 27.91% occurring between 2023 and 2024, when the program grew from 29,691 articles in 2023 to 37,978 articles in 2024. Over the longer period from 2019-2024, expenses grew at a rate of 13.66% per year. Simply put, publishing more articles has had a direct and significant impact on ACM’s overall expenses.

In addition, expenses related to the ACM Digital Library Platform have also increased, as ACM has invested heavily in improving the overall performance, usability, and functionality of the DL and embarked on a large-scale initiative to launch both Basic and Premium versions of the DL platform with robust features, functionality, and value-added content in 2026.

The Basic version of the DL will be available at no cost to end users and will contain open access versions of all ACM-published articles for downloading and sharing without limitation, while the Premium version will contain all of the same content contained in the Basic version, but with access to additional research content, including the full text of publications hosted in the ACM DL but not published by ACM, The ACM Guide to Computing Literature index of nearly 4,000,000 computing-related publication records; advanced search tools, such as AI assisted search; and research insights, such as usage metrics, citation trends, institutional and author profile pages, and altmetrics. While the Basic version serves as the open access repository of ACM Publications, the Premium version of the ACM DL includes all ACM publications, a curated list of non-ACM published full-text publications, the Guide to Computing Literature, and the world’s largest curated index dedicated to the field of computing, and a long and growing list of cutting-edge discovery tools and services, such as AI Assisted Search, Usage and Citation Data, and Institutional Profile Pages. For any researcher, student, practitioner, or educator working in this domain, access to the Premium version of the DL should be considered essential.

It is also notable that as more articles have been published open access in the ACM DL, network traffic-related expenses have increased dramatically over the past few years, as more people around the world are using the ACM Digital Library platform to conduct literature searches, download and consume articles, watch conference presentations and keynote addresses, build their professional networks, and catch up on the latest research in the computing domain. ACM is working hard to reduce these network-related expenses and all publications-related expenses for that matter to make financial sustainability achievable.

Lastly, over the past five years, the transition from institutional DL “read-only” subscriptions to the ACM Open model has involved dozens of intermediaries around the world—known as local subscription agents. These agents work closely with ACM staff and university library consortia, university libraries, government research institutions, and corporations to negotiate and license the ACM Open model on ACM’s behalf. Without this robust network of agents operating in Europe, Latin and South America, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and other regions around the world, ACM’s five-year transition to open access would quite simply not be possible, but of course this comes at a financial cost, which is detailed in Table 3.

Theme 3: Financial Sustainability

The above financials paint both positive and slightly concerning pictures of the challenge ACM faces with its transition to 100% open access publication on Jan. 1, 2026. While we have come a long way toward transitioning a majority of ACM’s Digital Library subscription income to ACM Open income, ACM is not yet at a point where it can claim that the new model is financially or editorially sustainable. To make this claim, ACM would need to generate at least enough income to cover all Publications-related expenses on an annual basis. In 2024, ACM had expenses of $28,854,059, and while we anticipate being able to reduce this figure over the next few years, as ACM publishes more articles in our various journal and conference programs it is reasonable to assume expenses will continue to rise over time, which means the only realistic way to achieve financial sustainability is to increase our publications-related income.

As a fully open access publisher in 2026 and beyond, this can only be achieved by bringing more institutions into the ACM Open program that are paying their fair share based on the number of articles published by affiliated authors and by generating APC income from those authors unaffiliated with ACM Open institutions. ACM needs the entire computing community’s help to assist with this effort.

For any researcher, student, practitioner, or educator working in this domain, access to the Premium version of the ACM Digital Library should be considered essential.

Longer term, ACM will work hard to identify new value-added products and services for the researcher, practitioner, and educator communities, but this will likely take years to develop and will have no impact on the near-term sustainability of ACM’s Publications program and as a result, ACM Publications will need to achieve sustainability based solely on the following income sources:

• ACM Open Institutional “Read + Publish” licenses

• ACM Digital Library Premium institutional subscriptions

• ACM Digital Library Premium individual subscriptions

• Article Processing Charges

• Advertising income from jobs.acm.org

From the above-listed income sources, only APCs and ACM Open licenses have the realistic potential to bridge the gap between ACM Publications-related income and expenses in the near term (2026–2028). While ACM is fully committed to the transition to 100% open access next year, only after ACM completes the transition and we start to see the level of income growth from these two income sources will we know how sustainable the transition to a fully open access publisher will be, but what is clear now is that ACM needs the full support of its authors, conference organizers, institutional library partners, and computer science departments around the world to support ACM’s transition.