The agreement gives 72 Canadian institutions unlimited open access publishing rights and full entry to ACM’s Digital Library—accelerating global visibility for Canadian computing research while advancing ACM’s 2026 full open access goal.
In a move set to accelerate open access in computing research, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has signed a transformative three-year read-and-publish agreement with eight Canadian regional library consortia. Covering 72 institutions nationwide—including top research hubs such as the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, and the University of British Columbia—the deal ensures both expanded access and cost-free publishing opportunities for Canadian researchers.
At its core, the agreement gives institutions Premium Access to the ACM Digital Library, one of the world’s most comprehensive repositories for computing and IT literature. The package includes the ACM Guide to Computing Literature, which indexes content from more than 8,000 publishers, along with advanced tools for search, citation, and scholarly discovery. More importantly, authors affiliated with participating institutions can now publish an unlimited number of open access articles in ACM journals, conference proceedings, and the International Conference Proceedings Series without paying article processing charges (APCs).
“This agreement reflects the power of regional collaboration in expanding access to academic publishing,” said Scott Delman, ACM’s Director of Publications. “We are proud to work with this group of Canadian consortia to support Open Access publishing and increase the visibility of research coming out of Canada.”
The eight participating consortia include the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), Partenariat des bibliothèques universitaires du Québec (PBUQ), British Columbia Electronic Library Network (BC ELN), and others representing colleges and universities across Canada.
For Canadian researchers, the benefits are twofold: enhanced global visibility of their work through open access publication, and immediate worldwide access for peers and practitioners. For the wider computing community, the deal means faster dissemination of Canadian contributions in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to quantum computing.
Launched in 2020, ACM Open has already attracted more than 2,700 institutions worldwide. The Canadian agreement marks a critical step toward ACM’s goal of transitioning its entire publishing portfolio to full open access by January 2026—an ambitious shift designed to democratize knowledge and make computing research freely available to all.
