The Digital Library : DL Pricing (Academic)

All Digital Library orders with a subscription start date of January 1, 2025 or after will receive 2025 pricing. Please note that the pricing listed below is for illustrative purposes. ACM has committed to transitioning the Digital Library to fully Open Access and, as such, we are no longer offering new read-only licenses. New subscribers can contact us for information about the ACM Open program.

2025 Academic List Pricing is valid for all institutions ordering directly through ACM.

Volume-based discounts are available for institutions ordering directly through an 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 The 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.

The ACM DL Full-Text Database consists of:

69 peer-reviewed scholarly journals; 7 fully Open Access peer reviewed scholarly journals
7 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)
38 Special Interest Group Newsletters
275+ New Conference Proceedings Volumes per year with a total of over 2,600 Proceedings Volumes in the ACM DL archive
Over 2,950,000 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 633,429+ 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.

2025 Academic List Pricing

Tiers	2024 New Subscriber List Prices (US$)	% Increase From 2024 Prices for Existing Subscribers	2025 New Subscriber List Prices (US$)
2-year Colleges	$2,000	0%	$2,000
Tier 1	$15,418	1%	$15,572
Tier 2	$22,262	2%	$22,707
Tier 3	$31,325	3%	$32,265

Discounts are 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, pricing needs to be more consistent with market pricing to enable ACM to continue investing in the publications themselves.

While 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 that should 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.