A Few Good Reasons to Publish in Communications

With the recent news that ACM authors now have the option to make their new articles Open Access via the ACM Digital Library in perpetuity by paying a one-time Article Processing Charge (APC), I started thinking about the long-term impact this new model could have on ACM, its Digital Library, and ACM’s publications. This naturally led me to thinking about the relationship ACM has with the computing community itself, why that relationship is so strong, and why the “business model” is ultimately less important for ACM than the need to continue offering valuable services to you, the reader and member of this community. As the publisher of Communications, I thought it might be worthwhile to dedicate this column to highlight some of that value specifically related to ACM’s flagship.

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Communications remains today one of the top-cited publications in computing.

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One of the incredible features of the ACM DL is the ability to aggregate a wide range of data and provide some level of analysis at the publication level. The chart here provides a very compelling answer to the questions “Why publish in Communications?” and “What is the value we offer?”

In addition to serving as the “community’s flagship,” Communications is the computing community’s go-to source for high-quality scholarly information that has consistently stood the test of time, not just over the years, but since the earliest days of the field itself. In addition to the data presented in this chart, I was able to count 52 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients and 487 ACM Fellows who have thus far graced the pages of the magazine with some of their finest work. Communications remains today one of the top-cited publications in computing and ranks number one in terms of citations or impact factor in several of the computer science subject areas covered by Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports.

Publishing in Communications is both an honor and privilege that many in the community even today covet as one of the crowning achievements of their careers in the same way scientists in other fields covet a publication credit in Nature or Science. When you publish in Communications, you know you are in good company and you know you will be read by the largest possible audience in computing, regardless of whether your article is Open Access or accessed via the thousands of institutions subscribing to the DL worldwide. When you look closely at some of the statistics generated by the ACM DL, I am sure you will agree.

Scott E. Delman, PUBLISHER

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