The Blue Diamond - April 2026

CONTENTS AT A GLANCE:

Introduction

Welcome to the April 2026 Issue of the Blue Diamond newsletter.

First and foremost—as of January 1, 2026, ACM is now a fully open access publisher! This issue will provide some information about the transition for ACM members, authors, librarians, ACM Special Interest Groups, conference organizers, ACM Volunteers, and other stakeholders who all helped make this transition a reality. To my knowledge, ACM is the only large society to transition entirely from a subscription-based publisher to an entirely open access publisher.

This is an incredible milestone, and the computing community should be proud of what it has accomplished. The transition was not without some bumps, but ACM Publications are now all freely available to read and download from the Basic version of the ACM Digital Library. Our community will benefit greatly from the increased access to and usage of the Digital Library, and the impact ACM Publications will have on students, computer scientists, and computing professionals worldwide.

In addition to updates related to ACM’s OA transition, this issue also includes updates from the 2026 Publications Board meeting, updates on new AI Publications from ACM, recently published ACM Books, and new ACM Journal EIC appointments.

As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions you have regarding any of the above or other topics of interest to you. Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

Scott Delman, ACM Director of Publications

Highlights From the March 2026 ACM Publications Board Meeting

The meeting occurred over a two-day period on March 16-17 and was attended by approximately 30-35 ACM Publications Board members, ACM volunteer leaders, ACM Journal Editors-in-Chief, and ACM staff. The agenda included presentations, discussions, and decisions related to topics including Open Access, Artificial Intelligence, ACM’s Authorship Policy, Research Integrity, Reproducibility, and Quantum Computing.

Key takeaways and action Items during the meeting related to the above topics were:

  • ACM President Yannis Ioannidis presented an update from the recently assembled ACM Presidential Taskforce on the Responsible Use of AI by ACM. The Task Force has been meeting weekly since late January 2026 with the goal of developing ACM-wide guidelines for the responsible use of AI by ACM that will govern future development of the ACM Digital Library, potential licensing of ACM Publications to LLMs, use of AI tools and services with ACM systems, and a range of other use cases. The Task Force is co-chaired by Virginia Dignum from Umea University in Sweden and Jeanna Matthews from Clarkson University in the United States. The Task Force will deliver its initial set of recommendations to the ACM Council on March 30, 2026, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
  • ACM will be updating its Ethics and Plagiarism Policies related to how submitted but not yet published articles from ACM Conferences are investigated and adjudicated when ACM receives allegations of misconduct in connection with those submissions. The updated policies will give ACM Conferences and Special Interest Groups increased authority to investigate and make decisions for lower-level policy violations. Once the existing Policies have been updated, ACM will communicate these changes on its ACM Publications Policies & Procedures website and via the various Special Interest Group and ACM Conference websites.
  • ACM has been conducting a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process to identify one or more Research Integrity Tools & Services providers to ensure that all article submissions to ACM’s journals, conference proceedings, and magazine are checked for various types of misconduct prior to peer review and publication by ACM, including checks for AI generated content, plagiarism, papermill activity, peer review manipulation, known bad actors, and other indicators of potential misconduct. Three of these service providers were given the opportunity to present their systems to the Publications Board and engage in a question-and-answer session with them during the meeting. ACM will be conducting pilots with each of these three finalists and then decide which system(s) to roll out for all ACM Journals and Magazines, ACM Conferences, and ICPS Conferences in 2027 and beyond.
  • The Publications Board discussed potential next steps for ACM’s Reproducibility and Badging Initiative. The group explored reasons for low badge uptake, such as confusion related to terminology and actual practice by sub-communities within ACM, and unanimously agreed to work towards developing a plan to significantly increase the uptake of research artifact evaluation across all ACM Publications. This initiative will become a higher priority for ACM over the coming months and years.
  • An update was given to the Publications Board regarding a high-level meeting with the AAAI Executive Committee and ACM Publications leadership held during the recent AAAI Annual Conference in Singapore in late January 2026. A list of potential opportunities for ACM and AAAI to collaborate on Publications, Awards, Conferences, Hosting content in the ACM Digital Library were discussed and in principle agreed by both organizations. Details for each initiative will be announced over the coming months.
  • The Publications Board voted unanimously to create a new ACM Digital Library Content Curation Committee to oversee the curation of third-party content in the ACM Digital Library. The Committee will be responsible for identifying computer science and related publications to host in the Basic and/or Premium versions of the Digital Library, evaluate the existing non-ACM published contents of the Digital Library Premium platform, and review and make decisions on applications from third parties requesting to index and/or host content in the ACM Digital Library. ACM is seeking a Computer Science or Engineering Librarian to Chair the Committee, who will build out the Committee over the coming months.
  • The Publications Board entertained a proposal to update ACM’s Authorship Policy with regards to disclosure requirements for the use of Generative AI systems during the ACM authorship process. The current Policy, which was last updated several years ago regarding AI use, is heavily focused on the need to disclose most types of AI use, but there was a general acknowledgement by the Board that the world has changed rapidly over the past two years with regards to AI use by authors and that disclosure of AI use is not happening in the community, despite a large percentage of authors using AI to author papers. The problem the Board is attempting to solve is not “non-disclosure”, but rather when AI use results in problems with submitted works, such as hallucinated references, plagiarized content, or other forms of misconduct that are not vetted and corrected by authors before submitting their Work to ACM Publications. The updated Policy will reduce the emphasis on disclosure, although disclosure will still be encouraged, and will increase the emphasis on accountability and responsibility by all named authors. Increased accountability and responsibility will be met with real consequences for all named authors on such papers. Once the Policy has been updated, additional information will be shared throughout the ACM community.

ACM Open Access

open access

As stated in the Introduction, ACM is now a fully open access publisher. All ACM Published articles dating back to 1947 may be read and downloaded freely from the Basic version of the ACM Digital Library.

As of today, there are 3,015 institutions participating in ACM Open with paid licenses from 69 countries around the world. All of these institutions and their affiliated users have access to the ACM Digital Library Premium version. In addition, 170 institutions have opted for Digital Library Premium licenses instead of ACM Open licenses. This means that 3,185 institutions and all of their affiliated faculty, students, and employees have access to DL Premium compared to approximately 2,600 institutions that historically subscribed to the Digital Library and had access to its content, features, and functionality before ACM began its transition to Open Access.

Authors from an additional 89 developing countries may publish with ACM in 2026 without the need to pay Article Processing Charges and authors from an additional 12 countries would receive a 50% discount off the current APC prices.

While it is ACM’s long-term goal to have as few ACM authors as possible required to pay APCs, this depends heavily on the adoption of ACM Open by affiliated institutions, and each institution needs to decide for itself if ACM Open or payment of APCs by authors is the right decision for that institution. If your institution does not currently participate in ACM Open and you are concerned about paying APCs when publishing with ACM, please recommend an ACM Open license to your department head or library. ACM can provide them with all of the details they need to make a decision that is right for your institution and for you as an ACM author.

In the first few months of the year, ACM has already started to see a significant rise in DL usage, which is now approximately 2x the number of full-text article downloads experienced during the same timeframe in 2025. Over time, we expect this increased usage to be accompanied by increased article-level citations, journal and conference impact factors, and an overall increase in the impact ACM publications will have on the global computing community.

One important and much debated aspect of the transition was the launch of two versions of the ACM Digital Library (Basic and Premium) in late December 2025, essentially flipping the old model of paywalled access to ACM Published full-text content while providing free to use tools, services, and bibliometric data to the new model with free access to all ACM Published full-text content while pay walling access to many of the tools, services, and third party and co-sponsored full-text content.

This approach was necessary for two main reasons:

First, to ensure the long-term sustainability of ACM as an Open Access Publisher, since making both the ACM full-text content and DL tools and services free to use without any financial support from institutions would almost certainly have resulted in mass institutional cancellations and the loss of millions of dollars of income needed to sustain ACM’s Publications and the ACM Digital Library platform.

Second, ACM lacks distribution rights from third-party Publishers such as IEEE, MIT Press, and other Publishers to make their content Open Access and doing so without their consent would be a violation of those agreements and create a risk for those third-party Publishers that ACM relies on to include high quality non-ACM published content in the Digital Library. While the transition to full Open Access has been a high priority for ACM, we can’t reasonably expect every other Publisher to do so in the same way or at the same time as ACM.

As we progress through this first year as a fully Open Access Publisher, ACM will continue to update the community on our progress with the transition and engage with the community on important decisions impacting authors, conferences, institutions, and other stakeholders who helped to make this transition possible.

Open Access for Authors

As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, discoverable, and reusable.

After the transition, articles that fall into the following categories will be published in the ACM Digital Library at no charge: 

  • If the corresponding author is affiliated with an institution participating in ACM’s transformative ACM Open model. A list of the institutions currently participating in ACM Open is available here. The corresponding author must be clearly designated in the journal or conference submission system, and they must use their institutional email address.
  • If the country in which the author’s affiliated institution is located is classified by the World Bank as a low-income country. 

For papers that do not fall into the above categories, an Article Processing Charge (APC) will be required. To support a smooth and fair transition and encourage broader ACM Open participation, ACM has introduced a temporary subsidy on APC pricing for 2026, funded directly by ACM.

Authors of peer-reviewed and accepted articles are now given the opportunity to choose between two Creative Commons  (CC) licenses for their work: CC-BY (Attribution) and CC-BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives). Both options obligate ACM to defend the work against improper use by third parties. With both licenses, authors retain all rights to their work.

To learn more, visit Publishing Open Access with ACM.

Upholding Integrity in ACM Publications

ACM Publications

ACM is committed to ensuring the highest standards of quality and trust across its publications. To support this, the ACM Ethics and Plagiarism Committee, comprised of volunteers with a vast knowledge of research integrity best practices and ethical publishing issues and policies, works closely with ACM headquarters staff, as well as domain experts as needed in individual cases, to uphold the integrity of the peer review process and the works published by ACM. This collaborative effort ensures that all works published by ACM meet the highest ethical standards as defined by ACM’s Publications Policies and Procedures.

We believe that maintaining integrity is a collective responsibility. If you witness or suspect any ethical violations or misconduct within ACM’s publications or ACM publication processes, please report it by filing an official claim, along with all supporting documentation and evidence, at our Report a Potential Publications Violation form.

ACM DL Basic / DL Premium Developments

ACM DIGITAL LIBRARY

The ACM Digital Library has come to serve a broad audience that includes researchers, educators, students, practitioners, librarians, institutions, and authors—and open access has moved from an emerging model to a core requirement for many of them. Users increasingly expect modern discovery tools, richer signals of value, and platforms that support a wide range of research, teaching, and professional workflows. In response to these changes, ACM undertook a multi-year effort to transition the Digital Library to open access.

That transition had two tightly coupled components: moving to full open access and introducing a new service model with two tiers—Basic and Premium. While response to the transition has been overwhelmingly positive, some members of the computing community expressed concerns and questions regarding the changes in the DL. This article reflects on the transition and what we learned along the way.

AI Publications Update

Journals

As a leading publisher in computing research and practice, ACM continues to deploy its unique strengths and resources to meet the opportunities and challenges of AI. As part of this ongoing commitment, ACM’s AI Publications Steering Committee, chaired by Francesca Rossi (IBM) and Sven Koenig (University of California, Irvine), has been working to enhance ACM’s journal publications in this area. The following new journals, supported by world-class editorial boards, have been added to ACM’s portfolio of AI-related publications:

The inaugural issue of ACM AI Letters, including an editorial from the Editors-in-Chief describing the goals of this innovative new publication, has now been published here.

These journals are all fully open access, with article processing charges waived for the first three years. We welcome high-quality submissions from the ACM author community.

New Titles From ACM Books

ACM Ibooks

ACM has recently welcomed Partha Roop of the University of Auckland and Edward Chang of Stanford University as Co-Editors in Chief of ACM Books, taking over the reins from Sanjiva Prasad of IIT Delhi and Marta Kwiatkowska of the University of Oxford. We also have some new recruits to the ACM Books Editorial Board: Sami Basu of Iowa State University, Andreas Kempa-Liehr of the University of Auckland, Manoranjan Mohanty of Carnegie Mellon University, Hammond Pearce of the University of New South Wales, Roopak Sinha of Deakin University, Jean-Pierre Talpin of INRIA, and Naijun Zhan of Peking University.

The Co-EiCs and Editorial Board will be devoting their efforts toward graduate and transdisciplinary texts, academic and professional monographs, and studies in the history and social impact of computer science.

The following new titles have recently been published in the ACM Books series:

ACM Publications Welcome New Editors-in-Chief

JOURNALS

ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) welcomes new Co-Editors-in-Chief Khai N. Truong and Karyn Moffatt for the term April 1, 2026 through March 31, 2029. Truong is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Moffatt is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University.

ACM Games: Research and Practice (GAMES) welcomes Catherine Flick and Laurissa Tokarchuk as new Co-Editors-in-Chief. The appointment is from April 1, 2026 through March 31, 2029. Flick is a Professor of Ethics and Games Technology at the University of Staffordshire. Tokarchuk is a Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University of London.

ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing (JETC) welcomes Partha Pratim Pande as New Editor-in-Chief for the term of March 1, 2026 through February 28, 2029. Pande is a Professor and Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Engineering at Washington State University.

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) welcomes Eitan Grinspun as its new Editor-in-Chief. The appointment is from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028. Grinspun is Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Toronto.

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TIIS) welcomes Giulio Jacucci (University of Helsinki) as new co-Editor-in-Chief joining Shlomo Berkovsky for a three-year term from November 15, 2025 to November 14, 2028.

XRDS Crossroads: The ACM Magazine for Students welcomes Julia Gersey as the new Editor-in-Chief. Gersey is second-year PhD student at The University of Michigan. The appointment is from November 1, 2025 to October 31, 2028.

ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies (JCSS) welcomes new Co-Editors-in-Chief Waylon Brunette (Augusta University), Sunandan Chakraborty (Indiana University), and Melissa Densmore (University of Cape Town) for the term of October 1, 2025 – September 30, 2028.

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) has named Alastair Donaldson as Editor-in-Chief for a three-year term starting September 1, 2025 and ending August 31, 2028. Donaldson is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London.

 

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