University of South Carolina Columbia faculty, staff and students will be able to publish open access at no-cost beginning July 1.

An agreement through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s top computing publisher, will provide free access to read content published by ACM and allow researchers to make their published works accessible to anyone, anywhere.

“University Libraries entered this read and publish agreement to support USC researchers in widely disseminating their work with no barriers to access. The agreement also allows our researchers to easily comply with funding mandates surrounding public access,” says David Banush, dean of libraries.

The ACM agreement follows similar agreements negotiated with publishers Wiley and IOP. It includes journals, magazines and conference proceedings listed on the ACM website.

Amie Freeman, university librarian for scholarly communications and open initiatives, says open access publishing has many benefits.

• High visibility. Articles are made freely available.
• High impact. Open access articles receive more citations.
• Easy compliance. Meet public access funder mandates automatically.
• Copyright retention. Articles are published under a Creative Commons license.
• Easy submissions. Authors are identified and work directly with ACM.
• No cap. Number of submissions is unlimited.

You must be a corresponding author (person responsible for the manuscript, correspondence and proofing) to be eligible, and articles must be accepted on or after July 1, 2023.

To learn more about University Libraries read and publish agreements, contact Freeman at dillarda@mailbox.sc.edu.