ACM Author Rights

ACM exists to support the needs of the computing community. For over sixty years ACM has developed publications and publication policies to maximize the visibility, impact, and reach of the research it publishes to a global community of researchers, educators, students, and practitioners. ACM has achieved its high impact, high quality, widely-read portfolio of publications with:

Affordably priced publications
Liberal Author rights policies
Wide-spread, perpetual access to ACM publications via a leading-edge technology platform
Sustainability of the good work of ACM that benefits the profession

Choose

ACM gives authors the opportunity to choose between two levels of rights management for their work. Note that both options obligate ACM to defend the work against improper use by third parties:

Exclusive Licensing Agreement: Authors choosing this option will retain copyright of their work while providing ACM with exclusive publishing rights.
Non-exclusive Permission Release: Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work must choose ACM's author-pays option, which allows for perpetual open access to their work through ACM's digital library. Choosing this option enables authors to display a Creative Commons License on their works.

Post

Otherwise known as "Self-Archiving" or "Posting Rights", all ACM published authors of magazine articles, journal articles, and conference papers retain the right to post the pre-submitted (also known as "pre-prints"), submitted, accepted, and peer-reviewed versions of their work in any and all of the following sites:

Author's Homepage
Author's Institutional Repository
Any Repository legally mandated by the agency or funder funding the research on which the work is based
Any Non-Commercial Repository or Aggregation that does not duplicate ACM tables of contents. Non-Commercial Repositories are defined as Repositories owned by non-profit organizations that do not charge a fee to access deposited articles and that do not sell advertising or otherwise profit from serving scholarly articles.

For the avoidance of doubt, an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv. ACM does request authors, who post to ArXiv or other permitted sites, to also post the published version's Digital Object Identifier (DOI) alongside the pre-published version on these sites, so that easy access may be facilitated to the published "Version of Record" upon publication in the ACM Digital Library.

Examples of sites ACM authors may not post their work to are ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, or Sci-Hub, as these sites are all either commercial or in some instances utilize predatory practices that violate copyright, which negatively impacts both ACM and ACM authors.

After an ACM journal submission has been accepted and has entered the production process, ACM makes the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) available for preview under the ACM “Just Accepted” program until the “Version of Record” is available and assigned to its proper issue. The AAM carries the article’s permanent DOI and can be cited immediately.

Distribute

Authors can post an Author-Izer link enabling free downloads of the Definitive Version of the work permanently maintained in the ACM Digital Library.

On the Author's own Home Page or
In the Author's Institutional Repository.

Reuse

Authors can reuse any portion of their own work in a new work of their own (and no fee is expected) as long as a citation and DOI pointer to the Version of Record in the ACM Digital Library are included.

Contributing complete papers to any edited collection of reprints for which the author is notthe editor, requires permission and usually a republication fee.
Authors can include partial or complete papers of their own (and no fee is expected) in a dissertation as long as citations and DOI pointers to the Versions of Record in the ACM Digital Library are included. Authors can use any portion of their own work in presentations and in the classroom (and no fee is expected).
Commercially produced course-packs that are sold to students require permission and possibly a fee.

Create

ACM's copyright and publishing license include the right to make Derivative Works or new versions. For example, translations are "Derivative Works." By copyright or license, ACM may have its publications translated. However, ACM Authors continue to hold perpetual rights to revise their own works without seeking permission from ACM.

Minor Revisions and Updates to works already published in the ACM Digital Library are welcomed with the approval of the appropriate Editor-in-Chief or Program Chair.

If the revision is minor, i.e., less than 25% of new substantive material, then the work should still have ACM's publishing notice, DOI pointer to the Definitive Version, and be labeled a "Minor Revision of"
If the revision is major, i.e., 25% or more of new substantive material, then ACM considers this a new work in which the author retains full copyright ownership (despite ACM's copyright or license in the original published article) and the author need only cite the work from which this new one is derived.

Retain

Authors retain all perpetual rights laid out in the ACM Author Rights and Publishing Policy, including, but not limited to:

Sole ownership and control of third-party permissions to use for artistic images intended for exploitation in other contexts
All patent and moral rights
Ownership and control of third-party permissions to use of software published by ACM