Evolving the ACM Journal Distribution Program

ACM’s Digital Library (DL) has become an enormously effective mechanism for the distribution of research articles and related material in the field of computing. The DL’s wide availability and associated facilities have greatly reduced the need, and demand, for producing research publications in print. Thus, ACM has been working to position its publications program to be more in line with the emerging online-centric view of the research community it serves. In this world, online publication is the principal focus, with distribution in print following, if it occurs at all, as an afterthought.

Forcing online publications to conform to print specifications artificially constrains innovative online publishing opportunities and practices. Thus, an important part of this transformation is to break from the traditional paper-centric view of journal publishing. Up to now, ACM journals were first and foremost print publications, with subsequent archiving and distribution through the DL. Our recent goal has been to reverse this; that is, for ACM journal articles to be published first online, with the date of the online appearance being the official publication date. Print issues, when they occur, are simply a secondary distribution mechanism unbundled from the official publication in the DL. This year, ACM is making the switch to this online-centric viewpoint for its Journals and Transactions.

Disassociating the official publication date from print provides ACM with the opportunity to solve another long-standing problem, that of long publication backlogs. Beginning this year, ACM will be putting its journal articles into production immediately upon acceptance. As soon as enough articles are ready, the next issue will be published in the DL. This will occur independent of the scheduled print appearance for the issue; that is, print distribution may be many months after an article’s appearance in the DL. This process, which we call online first, should permanently eliminate long publication backlogs for ACM journals. In steady state, we expect that the amount of time between acceptance and appearance in the DL will be at most 10 to 12 weeks.

Online first on an issue-by-issue basis is the first step in a transition to online first on an article-by-article basis, where issues themselves are accumulated in the DL on a piecemeal basis. ACM plans to make that additional transition during the next few years, further decoupling online publication from any print artifact, and reducing the time from acceptance to appearance to a few weeks.

To enable this change, ACM has revisited the means by which its articles are referenced. Within a given journal volume, each article is now designated by a sequence number; that is, an article number by which it is uniquely identified. To further disassociate articles from the print-centric world and to ready ACM for article-by-article publishing, each article’s page numbering now starts with 1. To enable ease of online access, each article published by ACM is now assigned a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI). DOIs are persistent identifiers that can be resolved to actual locations (URLs) by a resolution service. ACM runs one via http://doi.acm.org/, and participates in an industrywide DOI resolution service http://dx.doi.org/ through CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/).

With these changes, ACM is inaugurating a new reference format for its articles. For example, the 13th article in volume 3 of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG), which appears in the 2nd issue of the volume, posted online in May 2007, is referenced as follows.

Demaine, E. D., Iacono, J., and Langerman, S. 2007. Retroactive data structures. ACM Trans. Algor. 3, 2, Article 13 (May 2007), 20 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1240233.1240236. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240233.1240236

Note that the date given in the reference is associated with the article rather than the issue. The publication date for each article is provided on each page of the article. This is the date when the article is posted to the DL, not the date in which the print digest for the issue is subsequently distributed. The print issue itself no longer has a date associated with it, just an issue number. This is done to eliminate the confusion between article publication date and the date of print distribution.

Some additional changes have been made to the format of articles to support this changeover. The front matter for each article (which includes such things as the article’s title, authors, and abstract) now includes the suggested reference format for the article as shown here. To aid in sequential navigation, page numbers will be maintained in the headers on each page (of the article’s PDF file) in the format <articlenumber>:<pagenumber>, where <articlenumber> is the current article number and <pagenumber> is the current page number within the article. Citation displays in the DL and in printed Tables of Contents will now include the page length of each article as a size indicator. Finally, in the print version, a rectangular blob of ink is included on the outside edge of page 1 of each article to further ease the process of finding the start of each article in printed issues.

ACM is currently in the process of developing new BibTeX bibliographic style files that will produce this reference format. (Note that it is still possible to use older-style files that require traditional page numbers. In these cases one would identify page numbers in the example here using the form "13:1–13:20".)

ACM is not alone in making changes of this nature. A number of other publishers are switching to some form of online-first publishing. Several have also abandoned sequential page numbering throughout a volume. The American Physical Society (APS) and the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) are notable examples.

While these changes may seem jarring to some, we believe the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term adjustment that will be necessary to change over to this new system. These benefits include simplification of article production, elimination of backlogs, and a clearer pathway to the future of online publishing.