Wither ACM? Publish and Perish?

I joined ACM during my second year at university, at the end of my first computer science (CS) course (assembly programming on a PDP-11). Computing was in its infancy—Apple and Microsoft had been founded but were unknowns among a host of small companies trying to build businesses around the newly introduced microprocessors. I was excited to “advance the science, development, construction, and application of the new machinery for computing, reasoning, and other handling of information” (ACM’s original mission), so I joined the computing profession’s professional society. It didn’t hurt that students paid a small fee and received a large amount of printed technical material, but I joined because I felt ACM represented the computing profession that I wanted to be part of.

How many of you joined ACM for similar reasons?

Today, I do not feel the same ties to ACM. In short, ACM no longer has broad appeal as a professional organization, does not advance many members’ careers, and may not be a valuable affiliation in a more diverse technical world. The organization’s static membership numbers over three decades of computing’s explosive growth suggest most computing practitioners and many researchers share my feelings and never bother joining ACM.

In my opinion, it is time to recognize that ACM has shifted from functioning as a professional society for the academic computing community to a professional publisher. Today, ACM’s membership is small relative to the field and remains centered on traditional academic CS disciplines. It has not played a sustained or highly visible role in engaging with other scientific societies, government bodies, or the general public in the U.S., let alone in the rest of the world. ACM rarely articulates positions on important topics, and its few published opinions have not influenced public debates. I have not seen ACM’s name in the recent furious debates about the future of AI.

ACM still fosters communities by organizing conferences where its many subdisciplines gather, but this aspect is fading due to computing’s growth, the resulting proliferation of conferences, the shift to Zoom and other video platforms, and the cost and difficulty of international travel. Other scientific fields and new computing disciplines, such as AI, hold massive conferences that most people dislike but regularly attend to get a sense of where their field is going. ACM’s publication-focused, small-conference model was much more collegial and enjoyable, but it hasn’t scaled, and the cohesive communities it once fostered have fragmented.

So, ACM has become a publishing house, not just in its activities, but also in its priorities and incentives. Its business model is quite different from the big publishers in science—much to the benefit of CS—in that it supports conferences, not just journals, and charges reasonable prices. Most ACM members—and the rest of computing—see ACM as a publisher of papers, not a representative of their interests or an influential voice for computing.

ACM is transparent about its finances,1 and its revenue structure clearly shows that ACM is a publisher and conference organizer, not a professional society. In 2024, memberships brought in $1.4M of its total revenue of $25.2M (6%). The Digital Library brought in $19.3M (77%). If all ACM members quit, the organization would face minor budget problems (but much larger organizational problems, since unpaid volunteer labor produces the inexpensive conferences and journals). If the publishing stopped, ACM would be out of business.

It is time for the leadership to be explicit with its members about this fundamental shift and to ask ACM members whether this is the organization they want to belong to. If you accept publishing as ACM’s primary activity, it is far easier to overlook its stagnant membership and instead focus on alternative metrics, such as the number of conferences sponsored or papers published. Many signs suggest that the ACM leadership has understood this change for years and has tolerated or encouraged this evolution.

Or, if belonging to a publishing house isn’t what the members of ACM envision, then it is time to ask what ACM must do to become a professional organization again. Most ACM members I have spoken with favor this path, but they do not share a clear view of what a professional society should be in the 21st century, how it can represent the views and interests of a worldwide constituency, or what ACM can offer to the computing community beyond publications. My view is clear: A professional society organizes around its members; a publisher, around its publications.

It is time for ACM members to debate what kind of organization ACM should be and how to remake it into the society they want to belong to! Please use the discussion (below) to share your ideas!

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