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Open Access

Learn about Open Access and how to make your scholarship freely available.

About the Agreement

Lehigh University Libraries have signed a pilot transformative Open Access (OA) agreement with ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery. ACM OPEN is a “read and publish” agreement that grants the Lehigh community access to all ACM journals and proceedings while making all articles with a Lehigh-affiliated corresponding author in those publications openly available at the time of publication.

This pilot program, a first for Lehigh University Libraries, allows all active, Lehigh-affiliated corresponding authors to publish open access immediately with all ACM journals and conference proceedings at no cost to the authors. Readers anywhere in the world will be able to access Lehigh University scholars' ACM publications immediately. Importantly, Lehigh University affiliated-authors must be sure to be listed as the corresponding author and use their @lehigh.edu email address in the publication process to ensure their research article is Open Access.

Instructions for Authors

To take advantage of this agreement, Lehigh authors must be listed as the corresponding author and use their @lehigh.edu email address. 

Below is a brief summary of author instructions. For full guidance, please download and review the document entitled "ACM Author Workflow Journey 2022." 

  1. An email is sent to the corresponding author of a manuscript in each of these instances:
    1. Submission to an ACM journal
    2. Acceptance to an ACM journal
    3. Acceptance to an ACM conference
  2. Within this email is a link to the eRights form. After clicking on the rights form link, the corresponding author will be able to edit or confirm information about their publication. Remember to use your @lehigh.edu email address.
  3. After editing and verifying their paper details, corresponding authors should click the "Proceed to eRights Form" button.
  4. From the "Rights Options" page under "What rights do you grant to ACM?" select "Institutionally Paid Open Access."
  5. Next, select which version of a Creative Commons license you would like for your paper and click proceed. CC-BY, broadly OA but requiring attribution, is the most common.
  6. Finally, complete the "ACM Permission Release" form.
  7. Following submission of their eRights form, the corresponding author will receive an email confirmation.

For any questions, please contact rightsreview@acm.org or Phil Hewitt, Engineering Librarian - pjh315@lehigh.edu.