Comment by raphman

I have volunteered in various roles for ACM conferences and thus have some insight into ACM's path towards Open Access over the past years.

Just a few things to consider:

- ACM is not a for-profit publisher like Springer or Elsevier. Any profits made from their/our publishing activities subsidize e.g., outreach activities, travel stipends for developing countries, and potential losses from e.g. conferences. - In my experience, ACM is one of the very few publishers in computer science where you can generally trust the published papers. - Keeping a long-term digital library is not just "putting PDFs on a server" but involves a lot of additional costs. The ACM HQ is rather lean IMHO, but there are multiple people involved in developing the Digital Library, handling cases of copyright infringement and plagiarism, supporting volunteers, etc. Also, the ACM DL contains a rising number of video recordings of conference talks, etc. Additionally, there are several contractors to be paid. For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara. - In the past, subscriptions to the ACM Digital Library were a major, stable source of income for ACM. ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.