Message from ACM President Yannis Ioannidis

January 8, 2026

To the Community of Computing Professionals:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard from many ACM members and others in the computing community about recent changes to the ACM Digital Library. I appreciate the engagement and care people bring to these discussions, which reflects how central the Digital Library is in our professional lives and reinforces why this moment merits clarity and perspective.

As of January 1, 2026, ACM completed its transition to full open access: all ACM-published articles and related research artifacts in the DL are freely available worldwide without barriers to reading or reuse. This is a significant step forward for the computing field and reflects years of planning, collaboration, and input from across the community. Few scholarly societies have undertaken a transition of this scale, and we’re all proud to be leading the way and expanding access to computing research globally.

This move also required an evolution in how the ACM Digital Library operates as a research platform. To make the DL fully open while remaining financially sustainable, its set of services are now offered in two editions: DL Basic provides free, public access to all research content, while DL Premium offers advanced tools and value-added services designed to support deeper discovery, analysis, and institutional research workflows. The latter’s availability to institutions under ACM Open agreements or direct subscriptions provides revenue necessary to reach sustainability of the ongoing operation and development of the Digital Library. Today, millions of computing professionals and students from more than 3,000 universities, companies, and research institutions across more than 150 countries worldwide have access to DL Premium.

The Digital Library is leveraged in many ways, and ACM’s responsibility is to ensure that open access to content and access to advanced platform capabilities work together in service of the community’s broader goals. Our commitment to open access is unwavering, and we will continue to manage and evolve the Digital Library in a way that sustainably supports long-term use, ongoing innovation, and global participation.

The ACM Digital Library exists because of the sustained contributions of volunteers—authors, reviewers, editors, conference organizers, and the governance bodies that help shape ACM’s publishing decisions—as well as the trust placed in ACM as a volunteer-led professional society to steward that work responsibly. We take that responsibility seriously.

Open access was adopted because the computing community called for it and ACM responded.  We will be approaching our next steps with the same commitment to listening and the same care and deliberation. We will be evaluating how the Digital Library experiences are working in practice, reviewing specific features and overall usability, expanding functionality, and where appropriate, transferring capabilities from Premium to Basic. Indeed, we are already planning several changes based on community feedback from the early soft launch of the platform.

The transition to open access is ongoing. We will continue to listen, communicate, and adapt thoughtfully in partnership with the community as we move forward.

Yannis Ioannidis
ACM President
[email protected]