Which ACM copyright license to use?
First off, please note that IANAL.
That said, the Copyright Transfer Agreement is what ACM used to be doing to everyone: when you publish with the ACM, you transfer your copyright to them, and thus lose ownership of your creative work. The ACM has been receiving criticism for this as the Open Access movement has gained momentum.
The Publishing License seems to be their response to this criticism: with the Publishing license, you retain copyright yourself, and instead grant ACM a specified list of rights:
- An exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable and sublicenseable license to publish, reproduce and distribute the work in any way they feel like — including to hand these right on to other parties.
- A non-exclusive permission to publish, reproduce and distribute any software, artistic images and auxiliary materials.
- These rights “infects” any minor revisions (derivative work with less than 25% new substantive material).
I don't actually know what the exact implications here will be — the conditions are restrictive, but the copyright remains with the author.
There are three options with transferring authors rights to ACM:
- Open Access that requires paying >$1k.
- Publishing license means copyright license except that the author continues to hold copyright.
- "Traditional" copyright license.
Everyone author wants to have its paper as more distributed and open as possible without any paywall which directly leads to more citations and so on.
We can remove all money barriers with option #1 (Open Access).
Option #3 transfers absolutely all rights to ACM:
Plus: let's imagine that someone publish your paper with its own name. In that case ACM guaranties that it will defend against this situation, not you.
Minus: ACM can do anything it wants with your work, say, just delete. Or something more interesting as The ACM and Me article says: "Imagine what happens if in the future the ACM goes bankrupt. Creditors could become copyright trolls, sweeping the internet for illegal exchanges of ACM owned papers by academics".
Option #2 transfers not all rights, only an exclusive licence to publish, reproduce and distribute the work. But in this case "... which gives ACM the right but not the obligation to defend the work against improper use by third parties".
NOTE: Each option allows authors to "Post the Accepted Version of the Work on (1) the Author’s home page, (2) the Owner’s institutional repository, or (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based."
Casey Fiesler has addressed this question in her blog post "ACM Publication & Copyright", at https://medium.com/@cfiesler/acm-copyright-licenses-which-should-you-choose-and-how-do-you-handle-third-party-material-dbe87be8b57c (originally written in 2014, updated in 2018).
Her post analyzes all three options, and her own summary is as follows:
My typical tweet-sized response is: “License. No reason to transfer your copyright.”