Scholarly Communication Services

The Belmont Libraries and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have entered into a transformative Open Access agreement as part of the ACM OPEN pilot. ACM Open is a "read and publish" agreement that grants the Belmont community access to all ACM journals and proceedings in the ACM Digital Library while making all articles with a Belmont-affiliated corresponding author in those publications openly available at the time of publication. Participating in this program helps ACM transform their publishing model to fully open access, while helping to advance the visibility and access of Belmont-authored publications. To access the ACM Digital Library, click through the link on the A-Z databases list. 

This pilot program allows all active, Belmont-affiliated corresponding authors to publish open access immediately with all ACM journals and conference proceedings at no cost to the authors. Readers anywhere in the world will be able to access Belmont scholars' ACM publications immediately. Importantly, Belmont University affiliated-authors must be sure to be listed as the corresponding author and use their @belmont.edu email address in the publication process to ensure their research article is Open Access. Belmont authors will have the option to retain the copyright of their articles, and Belmont-authored publications supported by this agreement should be deposited into the Belmont Digital Repository. 

The current agreement applies to publications published beginning 7/1/2024 and accepted for publication prior to 6/30/2027. 

Once accepted, authors should familiarize themselves with the ACM Open Author Rights Workflow 2024 for next steps. 

• Who is eligible to participate? Corresponding authors who are affiliated with Belmont University are eligible for this program.

• Who is considered a corresponding author? Corresponding authors are either sole authors or co-authors of articles accepted by ACM for publication, who are designated by their co-authors to serve as the corresponding author for the accepted article.

• What article types are eligible for Open Access publication under this agreement? All fully peer-reviewed research articles newly published in ACM’s magazines, conference proceedings and journals are eligible.

• What do I need to do to participate? You must use your Belmont email address when you submit your work to ACM for publication. After your article is accepted for publication, you will receive an email from ACM Rights Review that mentions the Belmont Libraries agreement with ACM. After linking to the ACM's eRights form, if you want to take advantage of this agreement, you must select "Permission Release". 

• Which license should I choose? If you selected the Open Access (Permission Release) option, you will be asked to select your preferred Creative Commons License. While the default CC license, CC-BY (Attribution), allows you to retain all rights to your work and grants re-use rights to others, you can choose to add additional restrictions to the license. You can allow remixing, prohibit commercial use (CC-BY-NC), require Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA), or combine any of these 3 options. At the end of the day, any CC license supports open access. The choice of which CC license is entirely up to you. Fewer restrictions allow your work the widest possible discovery and re-use.

• What if I don't want to publish open access? You can still publish your article with ACM, even if you do not wish to use this open access option. This agreement does not limit or dictate your decisions on where or how you wish to publish. This agreement provides an open access publishing option with ACM at no cost to you. You can choose not to publish your work openly.

• What is a "Read and Publish" agreement? A Read-and-Publish agreement is an agreement in which the publisher receives payment for reading as well as payment for publishing bundled into a single contract. For more information about this, and other transformative agreements, see "Transformative Agreements: A Primer" by L. Hinchliffe.

• How do I deposit my publication in the Belmont Digital Repository once it's published? Check out the BDR Submission Guide and let Chuck Hodgin (chuck.hodgin@belmont.edu) know if you have any questions about that process. 

• I still have questions. Who can I ask? Claire Wiley, Scholarly Communications Librarian: claire.wiley@belmont.edu