The Geomblog

Matt Cutts, in an article on the new Gates Foundation open access policy (ht +Fernando Pereira) says that

while the ACM continues to drag its heels, the Gates Foundation has made a big move to encourage Open Access...

Which got me thinking. Why can't the ACM use this policy as a guidelines to encourage open access ? Specifically,

• Announce that from now on, it will subsidize/support the open access fees paid by ACM members
• (partially) eat the cost of publication in ACM publications (journals/conferences/etc)
• Use the resulting clout to negotiate cheaper open access rates with various publishers in exchange for supporting open access fees paid to those journals.

Of course this would put the membership side of ACM at odds with its publication side, which maybe points to another problem with ACM having these dual roles.