ACM has transitioned to a fully Open Access publishing model as of 1st January 2026, marking a key milestone in the process of making computing research and knowledge accessible to everyone. It implies that readers’ paywalls are removed and ACM articles in the Digital Library become open to everyone in the world. This represents a landmark also for the SIGMOD community, the flagship conference, and the other supported conferences in collaboration with other SIGs.
An important part of ACM’s transition to full Open Access is the ACM Open model where authors from ACM Open institutions can publish Open Access without Article Processing Charges (APCs). For authors from non-ACM Open institutions, ACM and SIG leaders have defined the details described below for 2026 to ensure a smooth transition and avoid leaving any authors or papers behind:
- Subsidized APC costs: The Article Processing Charge (APC) costs are subsidized by ACM and discounted:
- for articles where one of the named co-authors is an ACM or SIG Member, the subsidized rate is $250/article (down from the list price of $700);
- for articles where none of the named co-authors is an ACM or SIG Member, the subsidized rate is $350/article (down from the list price of $1,000).
- The APC costs apply only to APC-eligible articles.
- Geographic Waivers and Discounts: ACM provides geographic waivers and discounts to authors affiliated with institutions in countries covered by ACM’s agreements with EIFL and Research4Life and to authors affiliated with institutions in the lower-middle-income countries, as defined by the World Bank.
- Financial Hardship Waivers (FHW): SIGMOD, supported at 50% by the SIG Governing Board (SGB) in 2026, decided to fund Financial Hardship Waiver (FHW) requests for ACM and SIGMOD members and to ensure that any contributions whose authors cannot afford APCs because of financial hardship are covered.
The SIGMOD ACM Open Committee is responsible for assessing the FHW applications and granting (or not) the waiver. The committee handles all the requests for the SIGMOD 100% sponsored conferences—namely, SIGMOD and PODS—and the co-sponsored conferences—namely, KDD, WSDM, DEBS and SoCC—in agreement with the other co-sponsoring SIGs, i.e., SIGKDD, SIGIR, SIGOPS, and SIGWEB. You can reach the committee at apc-financial-sigmod@acm.org.
To grant a waiver, the SIGMOD ACM Open Committee adheres to the general ACM Policy on APC Waivers for Financial Hardship and adopts some additional criteria (e.g., SIGMOD membership).
SIGMOD ACM Open Committee
Lei Zou, Peking University (China) – Chair
Jana Giceva, TUM (Germany)
Yixiang Fang, Chinese University of Hong Kong (China)
Arijit Khan, BGSU (USA)
Sujaya Maiyya, University of Waterloo (Canada)
Babak Salimi, UCSD (USA)
How do Authors Request a FHW?
The figure above shows the overall workflow for APC costs and/or FHW requests. After a paper is accepted, the corresponding author receives an email to complete the eRights Publishing Workflow. This process includes the APC Settlement, which can either happen through an ACM Open membership or Author Payment.
If the authors have to pay an APC and cannot afford to pay during settlement, they can request a FHW during the eRights Publishing Workflow. To request a FHW, the corresponding author provides a justification and funding details of the research. The request is then routed to the SIGMOD ACM Open Committee, which approves or declines the request.
If the FHW is approved, the authors go back to the Author Payment step and the payment will be fully waived. If the FHW is declined, the authors can still make a payment. If they don’t make the payment, the paper will not be published in the proceedings (e.g., PACMMOD for SIGMOD). In the case of PACMMOD, the paper publication is deferred to a future issue as soon as the author payment step is completed.
A clarification on the notion of corresponding author has to be made in this workflow. If among the co-authors of a paper, some of them belong to an institution part of ACM Open, then one of those co-authors needs to be indicated as corresponding author, so that the ACM eRights system will recognize her/him and automatically settle the APC costs; this author will be also the one who is going to receive notification emails from the ACM eRights system. Note that, for all of this to properly happen, the corresponding author has to use her/his institutional email (not a personal one), so that the ACM eRights system can recognize her/him as belonging to an institution part of ACM Open.