Dealing with the deep, long-term challenges facing ACM (part I)

from the president I N AN EDITORIAL last month, ACM CEO John White reported on the outcomes of the November 2013 ACM Strategic Planning Retreat. The retreat generated a number of important new ideas in the areas of membership, conferences , publications, community, and practitioners. While they are likely to have a significant impact on ACM's activities going forward, I view them as defining only a relatively short-term agenda not fully addressing some deep issues facing ACM, issues we still need to understand and deal with. The challenges and opportunities of open access served as the original motivation for holding the retreat. Despite setting the modern standard for a liberal copyright policy in the digital age (over a decade ago), opening more content under the discretion of ACM authors and SIGs, fully embracing Green/Gold/Hybrid OA publishing, and complying with government mandates, there is a sense among a portion of our community that we have still not done enough. A sense that if an ACM publication sits behind any sort of paywall—regard-less of it also being freely available via an author's site, an author's institutional site, a SIG site, or even a conference site—we are somehow failing to meet our commitment to nurture the free flow of information. This position informed much of the retreat discussion. It led to our decision to encourage SIGs to open conference proceedings around the event and until its next occurrence, and it led to our decision to begin work on understanding the " article of the future , " in the broadest sense, along with the digital collection that might serve as host. But what it failed to do is lead us into a discussion of whether there can (even should be) a model for ACM in which publication revenue plays little or no role. ACM has a pretty straightforward business model. There are three major revenue streams: membership dues, conference registration fees, and publication subscription fees. Each has related sets of expenses. Membership runs at a loss—mainly because we subsidize students and members from developing countries. Conferences typically run at a surplus (not always—some conferences have lost considerable sums), but that surplus is retained by the SIGs and invested directly into serving and subsidizing their respective technical communities however they see fit. That leaves publications. Right now, publications overall (but not universally) generate a surplus. That surplus is used to underwrite the membership loss …