ACM Author Rights

ACM exists to support the needs of the computing community. For over seventy 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 Creative Commons (CC) licenses for their work. Note that both options obligate ACM to defend the work against improper use by third parties. With both licenses, authors retain all rights to their work, and the work is made available with perpetual open access through ACM's Digital Library.

The two license options are:

  • CC-BY: Requires attribution but allows maximum reuse. ACM is experimenting with Large Language Models and AI-generated summaries, and is considering licensing ACM articles for Large Language Model training. If you assign a CC-BY license, you are telling ACM that you are okay with your paper being used for AI summaries and AI training.  
  • CC-BY-NC-ND: Prohibits the use of the material for commercial purposes and the distribution of derivative works, except upon explicit permission by the authors. Please note, however, that all authors publishing with ACM will continue to be required to grant ACM the right to serve as the official Publisher of that Work with associated commercial rights, including the right to license the Work to third parties, such as for training by LLMs. 

These license options ensure compliance with the vast majority of global funder mandates. ACM will continue to defend all published works against improper use by third parties, regardless of license type.

These licenses govern what third parties may do with your published work. A separate grant of rights to ACM covers what ACM, as the Publisher, may do with the work, which includes (1) a non-exclusive license to publish that Work in the ACM Digital Library, (2) the right to serve as the official Publisher of that Work with associated commercial rights, including the right to license the Work to third parties, such as for training by LLMs, and (3) the right to defend the integrity of that Work against various forms of infringement and misconduct by third parties on behalf of the author.

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 pre-publication versions of their work to 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

For articles published under a Creative Commons license or equivalent permissions release agreement, authors can post the Version of Record (VOR) of their article:

  • On the Author's own Home Page
  • In the Author's Institutional Repository
  • Any Repository legally mandated by the agency or funder funding the research on which the work is based
  • Any Repository or Aggregation that does not duplicate ACM tables of contents. 

As from January 1, 2026, all articles published by ACM will be published on an Open Access basis in the ACM Digital Library and the entire archive of ACM published journal, conference, and magazine articles will be freely available on the Basic version of the ACM Digital Library. For all ACM articles, including those published prior to ACM’s transition to full Open Access publishing, authors can post the link to the Digital Library page for their work enabling free downloads of the Definitive Version of the work permanently maintained in the ACM Digital Library

  • On the Author's own Home Page
  • 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.

  • 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).

For papers not published under a Creative Commons license or equivalent permissions release agreement:

  • Contributing complete papers to any edited collection of reprints for which the author is not the editor, requires permission and usually a republication fee.
  • Commercially produced course-packs that are sold to students require permission and possibly a fee.

Create

Regardless of the particular CC license selected by the authors, all authors publishing with ACM are required to grant ACM the right to serve as the official Publisher of that Work with associated commercial rights, including the right to license the Work to third parties, such as for training by LLMs, and the right to make Derivative Works (including translations) or new versions. 

However, for all ACM works, 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 Publication Rights & Licensing 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