Which ACM copyright license to use?

Question

ACM now offers authors of published papers a choice of two copyright licenses: the "traditional" ACM Copyright Transfer Agreement or the ACM Publishing License.

How should I choose between these two licenses? What are the advantages and disadvantages to the authors of each license?

I care a lot about maximizing the ability of others to read the paper (e.g., maximizing my ability to make my paper available on my web page, institutional repository, etc.); are there any relevant differences between the two licenses that affects this consideration? Are there any other important differences between the licenses that authors might care about?

Answer 1

First off, please note that IANAL.

That said, the Copyright Transfer Agreement is what ACM used to be doing to everyone: when you publish with the ACM, you transfer your copyright to them, and thus lose ownership of your creative work. The ACM has been receiving criticism for this as the Open Access movement has gained momentum.

The Publishing License seems to be their response to this criticism: with the Publishing license, you retain copyright yourself, and instead grant ACM a specified list of rights:

1. An exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable and sublicenseable license to publish, reproduce and distribute the work in any way they feel like — including to hand these right on to other parties.
2. A non-exclusive permission to publish, reproduce and distribute any software, artistic images and auxiliary materials.
3. These rights “infects” any minor revisions (derivative work with less than 25% new substantive material).

I don't actually know what the exact implications here will be — the conditions are restrictive, but the copyright remains with the author.

Answer 2

There are three options with transferring authors rights to ACM:

1. Open Access that requires paying >$1k.
2. Publishing license means copyright license except that the author continues to hold copyright.
3. "Traditional" copyright license.

Everyone author wants to have its paper as more distributed and open as possible without any paywall which directly leads to more citations and so on.

We can remove all money barriers with option #1 (Open Access).

Option #3 transfers absolutely all rights to ACM:

• Plus: let's imagine that someone publish your paper with its own name. In that case ACM guaranties that it will defend against this situation, not you.

• Minus: ACM can do anything it wants with your work, say, just delete. Or something more interesting as The ACM and Me article says: "Imagine what happens if in the future the ACM goes bankrupt. Creditors could become copyright trolls, sweeping the internet for illegal exchanges of ACM owned papers by academics".

Option #2 transfers not all rights, only an exclusive licence to publish, reproduce and distribute the work. But in this case "... which gives ACM the right but not the obligation to defend the work against improper use by third parties".

NOTE: Each option allows authors to "Post the Accepted Version of the Work on (1) the Author’s home page, (2) the Owner’s institutional repository, or (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based."

Answer 3

Casey Fiesler has addressed this question in her blog post "ACM Publication & Copyright", at https://medium.com/@cfiesler/acm-copyright-licenses-which-should-you-choose-and-how-do-you-handle-third-party-material-dbe87be8b57c (originally written in 2014, updated in 2018).

Her post analyzes all three options, and her own summary is as follows:

My typical tweet-sized response is: “License. No reason to transfer your copyright.”

Answer 4

Reading now the list of permanent rights:

Post the Accepted Version of the Work on (1) the Author's home page, (2) the Owner's institutional repository, (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based, and (4) any non-commercial repository or aggregation that does not duplicate ACM tables of contents, i.e., whose patterns of links do not substantially duplicate an ACM-copyrighted volume or issue. Non-commercial repositories are here understood as repositories owned by non-profit organizations that do not charge a fee for accessing deposited articles and that do not sell advertising or otherwise profit from serving articles.

I think this (especially option (4)) means that one can post accepted versions to arXiv and like, even when transferring copyright to ACM, or giving them an exclusive license. Based on answers above, it seems also that option (4) is a newer one.

Some more information is available also in SHERPA/RoMEO publisher copyright policies & self-archiving index.

They ask to put a statement similar to the following in such case:

"© {Owner/Author | ACM} {Year}. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in {Source Publication}, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/{number}."

The tricky thing is how to put this notice in. I had to change acmcopyright.sty.