Unofficial ACM Publications FAQ

Jonathan Aldrich

The purpose of this document is to supplement official ACM documentation on publications with answers to a some questions that come up frequently. Although I serve on the ACM Publications Board, this page is not intended to be an authoritative reference for ACM policy or procedures. Neverthless, it sometimes takes a bit longer to get information out on authoritative channels, and in that spirit, I hope this is helpful.

If you have a question that is not on this list but should be, don't hesitate to contact me at jonathan.aldrich@cs.cmu.edu.

I'm having trouble with TAPS, the new ACM Publishing System. What should I do?

TAPS appears to work well for many simpler documents, but authors who use LaTeX in more interesting ways have seen challenges. It's an important initiative, however, because it supports HTML publication, which allows ACM papers to be accessible to those with disabilities, and also it makes it easier to read papers on devices smaller than a sheet of paper. Here are some resources that may help with TAPS:

Read the official ACM documentation on TAPS.
Stephen Spencer, who is also on the ACM Publications Board, has an unofficial web page specifically on TAPS, which includes some additional useful information. It's a bit more in-depth than the official ACM documentation.
If you are using a package that is not on the approved list, then I encourage you to send suggestions to acmtexsupport@aptaracorp.com RE: TAPS LaTeX Package evaluation--especially if this is a package that many others in your community are likely to use.
If you are trying to get your document through TAPS and the above information is insufficient, contact support at tapssupport@aptaracorp.com. Be sure to include the publication and article title in the subject line along with the specific details. If your issue appears to be a deeper problem with TAPS, it's reasonable to cc Craig Rodkin (see next bullet).
If your document has made it through TAPS, but this was more trouble than it should have been, a good person to contact is Craig Rodkin, the ACM Publications Operations Manager, who can try to address the issue so it is not a problem for future ACM authors. Contact rodkin at hq.acm.org, and send him the article details so he can follow up with the team.

My institution signed ACM Open, so my article should be published Gold Open Access for free. But I don't have that option in the ACM e-rights form. What can I do?

ACM Open applies to the corresponding author only. So if you want to get Gold Open Access via ACM Open, then your corresponding author needs to be from an ACM Open institution.

Perhaps your corresponding author is set incorrectly. This can happen if your conference management system does not explicitly gather the single corresponding author (which is a different concept than HotCRP's multiple "contact authors"). In that case, the corresponding author is often defaulted to the first author, which may not be correct.

If you are filling out the e-rights form you can figure out who the current corresponding author is. The e-rights form has a link to "edit title/author." Clicking this link leads to a popup. The pop-up window shows which author is the corresponding author (there's a green check mark).

If the corresponding author is set incorrectly, you can contact ACM production staff (production@hq.acm.org. If you have any trouble, please feel free to contact me and I will be happy to help advocate to make sure the right thing happens...making ACM Open succeed is important to all of us on the Publications Board!