The Digital Library :

Policies

Archival and Perpetual Use Rights
Authorized Users
Authorized Uses for Institutional DL Subscribers & Consortium Members
Authorized Uses for ACM Members & Individual DL Subscribers
Institutional Membership Policy
When it's time for an Institutional Subscription?

Institutions with a subscription to the ACM Digital Library have access to the entire archive of all the materials in the Digital Library for the course of their subscription. Upon either non renewal of an institution’s subscription, an institution has perpetual use rights to the materials published during the year(s) of their subscription. These institutions do not have perpetual use rights to archive of materials post cancellation.

ACM has arrangements with third party archiving solutions. Institutions may work with these organizations to arrange access to the materials they have perpetual use rights to.

ACM has partnerships with:

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Authorized Users

The following categories of users of the ACM Digital Library (DL) are recognized as Authorized Users: persons affiliated with the Subscribers as students, faculty, registered users or employees, authorized persons physically present in the Subscribers’ library facilities.

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Authorized Uses for Institutional DL Subscribers & Consortium Members

The ACM licenses access to its Digital Library of publications and published materials to educational, research, non-profit and non-governmental (NGOs), government, and corporate institutions. These licenses allow large groups of software developers, designers, IT professionals, researchers, engineers, students, and others access to all of the contents of the ACM Digital Library concurrently.

No ownerships rights over the materials published within the ACM Digital Library are transferred as part of these licenses, although certain archival and fair use rights do apply to institutional customers. There are no limitations placed on the number of downloads allowed on an annual basis for institutional customers, although in most cases there is a direct or indirect relationship between pricing and download activity at the institutional level.

Access is typically granted via IP Authentication. In limited cases, ACM enables the use of domain name lookup for corporate institutions.

For institutional subscribers to the ACM Digital Library, the following uses are authorized:

Sharing of materials from the ACM Digital Library amongst colleagues from within the same institution
Use of ACM Digital Library materials in courses, electronic reserves, distance learning within the subscribing institution,participation in established Inter Library Loan programs among subscribing institutions, and Walk In Use.
Course Material - Permission granted without fee if the course material is produced without charge to the student. (See Commercially produced Course Packs below)
Electronic Reserves - Permission granted without fee provided the library or institution has an authentication mechanism for controlled access to the server and a license to the ACM-copyrighted work. A college, university or other accredited institution may place a single copy of a definitive version of the work in its library's electronic reserves for the duration of its educational needs for that work, provided that access is limited to its enrolled students (including those in its distance learning programs), faculty, and staff. Those institutions without a current license to the work should contact permissions@acm.org.
Distance Learning - Permission granted without fee for distance learning students enrolled at the institution. They have the same access rights to those ACM copyrighted materials licensed by their institution as any other student. Since institutional access is authenticated by IP address, it is up to the institution to provide a proxy server for its remote users, and to register the IP address of that proxy with ACM.
Interlibrary Loan (ILL) - Permission granted without fee for an institution with an ACM Digital Library license to download and print works for Interlibrary Loan. The Digital Library may be used as the source for the printed copy. The loan of the work is limited to printed copies, as part of normal library functions under CONFU Guidelines. Electronic dissemination is not allowed.
Walk-Ins - Permission granted without fee for access to all ACM publications, print or electronic, by all members of the community which a subscribing library is charted to serve.

Under no circumstances are the following actions permitted:

Sharing access to ACM DL materials with individuals or organizations outside the subscribing institution
Using scripts or spiders to automatically download articles or harvest metadata from the ACM Digital Library. This activity is a serious violation of ACM’s DL usage policy and will result in the temporary or permanent termination of download rights for the subscribing institution.
The posting of ACM DL materials on an 3rd party server or peer to peer network without the written permission from the ACM.

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Authorized Uses for ACM Members & Individual DL Subscribers

Individual ACM members have the option of subscribing to the ACM Digital Library for personal use. Personal use may include reading, viewing, downloading, or printing materials from the ACM Digital Library. The personal use of materials from the ACM Digital Library may take place in a private, educational, or corporate setting, but use of the materials and access to the ACM DL should be limited to the individual subscriber.

Under no circumstances are the following actions permitted:

Sharing of individual usernames and passwords with others
Transferring your account to another individual
Sharing materials within the Digital Library that require username and password access. This includes but is not limited to emailing files from the Digital Library to others, sharing printed materials from the Digital Library, or posting materials from the Digital Library on a server or peer to peer network without written permission from the ACM. (Note: Authors of ACM Publications retain certain distribution rights regarding their own published materials that supersede the above policy.)
Using scripts or spiders to automatically download articles or harvest metadata from the ACM Digital Library.
Exhibits user download activity indicative of sharing access rights with more than a single user.

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Institutional Membership Policy

ACM no longer accepts new institutional membership subscriptions from individual institutional subscribers, but will continue to service existing institutional subscriptions as in the past. The best way for new institutional subscribers to get access to the ACM Digital Library is via an established academic library consortium agreement.

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When it's time for an institutional subscription?

There is an educational or business need for your organization to gain access to the Digital Library.
There is a need to share published works included in the Digital Library with other people in your organization.

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