Scholarly Publishing

Open access (OA) journals do not charge readers or institutions subscription fees or per-article charges for access. OA articles are typically free to read, copy, use, and distribute with attribution, ensuring that all readers have access to scholarship. To support this model, authors publishing in OA journals may be charged article processing charges (APCs).

Tufts has funding available for faculty, staff, and students to cover APCs for authors who would like to publish open access but do not have other sources of funding. Find out more about about funding opportunities. We also have memberships to some journals and publishers to receive free or discounted APCs for Tufts authors, including Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), BioMed Central, and Springer Open journals.

Non-OA articles can be made freely & openly available in the Tufts Digital Library under the terms of most publisher's agreements. Find out more about sharing in the Tufts Digital Library.

Tufts has signed a transformative open access agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Under this new agreement, Tufts corresponding authors publishing in ACM journals, proceedings, and magazines can make their articles freely available to anyone (open access) at no cost to the author. 

Tufts will now pay a single fee to ACM to cover both article publication costs and subscription access to the ACM Digital Library for the Tufts community. Authors will retain copyright to their articles and can choose to apply a Creative Commons license to their work to encourage sharing and reuse. 

The Tufts libraries have transitioned to this model as part of our ongoing commitment to support open access at Tufts and to ensure immediate, free access to Tufts-authored publications for a broad audience, not just those who have subscription access to ACM material. The agreement is a step in the transition towards ACM’s stated commitment to a future where all scholarly articles are published open access in the ACM Digital Library.

Eligibility | How it works | Find out more

Eligibility

• All research articles, review articles and conference or proceedings papers submitted to ACM by a corresponding author whose primary affiliation is Tufts are eligible to be made open access at no cost to the author under the terms of this agreement.
• Articles submitted between January 1, 2021 and December 21, 2025 are eligible
• You must use your @tufts.edu email address when submitting an article to be routed into the ACM Open program

How it works

• Upon acceptance, the corresponding author will receive an email with a link to ACM’s eRights platform
• Select the default option “Institutionally paid Open Access with Author Retaining Copyright and all rights to their work”
  • If you prefer not to publish your work open access, select one of the other two options
• If you’ve selected the “Institutionally paid Open Access” option, you’ll then choose a Creative Commons license to apply to your article
• Your article will then be made available in the ACM Digital Library under the terms of the options you’ve chosen
• ACM will also deposit copies of all articles published under the agreement into the Tufts Digital Library.

Find out more

Contact David Fristrom, Research Librarian for Engineering, with any questions about the ACM Open program.

Find out more about the program on the ACM Open site, or read more about open access on the Tufts Scholarly Communications site.