There’s some nuance to this surrounding the “creative commons” licensing of these ACM publications.

Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).

Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.

Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:

“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”

This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.

#FreeAlanTuring