The Digital Library :

DL Pricing

Download the 2015 Academic Pricing Guide Here

Download the 2014 Academic Pricing Guide Here

Note:

  1. All Digital Library orders with subscription start date of January 1, 2015 or after will receive the new 2015 pricing.
  2. 2015 Academic List Pricing is valid for all institutions ordering directly through ACM. 
  3. Volume-based discounts are available for institutions ordering directly through academic library consortium. Please see below for more details.
Academic consortium pricing is based on several factors, including:
  • Annual list prices for institutions ordering directly through ACM
  • Number of participating members in the consortium
  • Carnegie classifications and usage for the largest US-based academic institutions. Click here for the ACM-Carnegie Classification Conversion
  • Usage for all International-based academic institutions
  • Discounts available for multi-year licenses
  • Economic discounts based on 2014 World Bank List of Economies
Annual licenses to the ACM Digital Library include access to all contents of the ACM Digital Library and Guide to Computing Literature Index. 
For 2014, the ACM DL Full-Text Database consists of: 
  • 54 Total Journals, of which 44 are ACM owned and published titles and an additional 12 are published by affiliated organizations and hosted by ACM in the DL by special arrangement
  • 8 Niche Technology Magazines containing peer reviewed articles, practitioner-oriented articles, commentary, news, blog entries, and multimedia content (including ACM's flagship magazine the Communications of the ACM)
  • 37 Special Interest Group Newsletters
  • 275+ New Conference Proceedings Volumes per year with a total of over 2,500 Proceedings Volumes in the ACM DL archive 
  • Over 2,237,215 records in the Guide to Computing Literature Index. For each record, a complete citation page exists with links to the full-text of that record hosted by third parties. For the 407,367+ records contained in the ACM DL published by ACM, the full-text is immediately available on the DL platform and included in the annual license.
2014 & 2015 Academic List Pricing

2015 Tiers2014 Tiers2014 Academic List Prices (US$)2015 Academic List Prices (US$)
Tier 1Tier 1 $2,000$13,689
Tier 2$13,689
Tier 2Tier 3$15,073$16,905
Tier 4$16,413
Tier 3Tier 5$18,016$20,597
Tier 6$18,716
Tier 7$19,432

* Discounts based on ACM consortium discount policy, but typically range between 40%-50%

As academic libraries feel increasing pressure to justify their expenditures on periodicals and scholarly databases, it is becoming progressively important for publishers to evaluate the benefit their users are getting out of these resources, and to make adjustments when necessary. In the case of the ACM Digital Library, our pricing continues to be among the lowest of all scholarly publishers, regardless of which metric is used for evaluation, however in some instances that pricing needs to be more consistent with market pricing to enable ACM to continue investing in the publications themselves.

For the year 2015, ACM introduce a new three-tier pricing system. All existing subscribers will be placed in the appropriate 2015 tier. Several benefits of this new system for subscribers include the elimination if usage-based tier movements on a going forward basis, the inclusion of FTE information for tiering of new subscribers, and the greater consistency and transparency of annual price increase for all subscribers.

As from January 1, 2015, the following tier-structure will be utilized to identify the appropriate tier for each subscribing institution: 

ACM TiersUnited States Pricing International Pricing
Carnegie ClassificationUsageUsage
Tier 1

1 -14

21 - 33

n/a0 - 500
Tier 2

18 - 20

16 - 17

n/a501 - 5,000
Tier 315

10,001 - 25,000

25,000 +

5,000+

 

While the importance of the usage is becoming an increasingly important metric for determining the value of the ACM Digital Library at an institutional level, we continue to believe strongly that usage is not the only metric which should be used to determine value. Simply having access to the number of high quality publications that exist in the ACM Digital Library and Guide to Computing Literature Index has an inherent value on its own that we believe far exceeds the cost charged to all subscribing institutions.

If you have questions about the above changes for 2015, please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. Thank you.

Updated May, 22nd 2014