The good places to submit your papers

Posted by Jesper on December 19, 2025

This week, the ACM made the monumental(ly stupid) decision to replace the abstracts of papers on their Digital Library website by AI-written summaries. While this did not apply to all papers, and it was only visible to “premium members” (which includes anyone logging in from the network of a university that has an ACM subscription), it was not just annoying but actively harmful to science, as explained in much more detail in this blog post by Anil Madhavapeddy. Because of some significant backlash from the community, it was quickly decided to stop presenting the AI summaries as the default view and to add a disclaimer. Still, the fact that the people in charge at ACM decided this was a good idea in the first place should be pretty worrying to the computer science community.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the ACM has made some questionable decisions either. I can highly recommend reading this blog post by William Bowman if you want to understand more about the harmful decisions that have been made from a profit-seeking motive over the past few years.

So what can we do about this? Well, since the ACM is supposed to be a community of computer science researchers, it makes sense to try to argue for the ACM to adapt its policies and improve its organization so these decisions are made in a better (more democratic and less profit-seeking) way in the future. However, this approach has its limitations, as was already pointed out clearly in this Mathstodon post by Jon Sterling from 2023, which I will quote here in full:

I think it is so interesting that whenever anyone criticises ACM, someone comes out of the woodwork to say “ACM is a democracy of its membership, if you want to change it, vote or join a committee!”

We already tried that. Some of our very best researchers already serve on these committees and are doing their best to solve these problems, but there has been literally no change and no indication that changes are likely on many important issues (I recognise that some things have improved). If you are doubtful, ask yourself whether ACM is still farming out your papers’ typesetting to expensive and incompetent firms that replace your (somewhat) accessible vector-art mathematical figures with blurry screenshots in raster format…

If there were any way to resolve this through ACM’s democracy, that would have happened already. I have too much respect for the community members serving on the pertinent committees to conclude otherwise…

What is really happening is that people with legitimate complaints are being told to “feed the beast” — there is no better way to put someone out of action is to get them stuffed into a committee somewhere.

A more radical approach would be to vote with our feet and move away from ACM as the central point of organization of our community. I’m not (necessarily) calling for a full boycott, but we should at least be aware that a better way of publishing papers exist and support those alternatives by submitting papers to them and reviewing for them when we are in a position to do so. To make this process a little easier, I made a list of all the journals, conferences, and workshops that set the right example. In particular, I believe the following publishers are doing a great job at publishing open access papers in a way that is affordable (or even free) and transparent to authors and readers alike:

Besides being a publisher, Schloss Dagstuhl also runs the invaluable dblp bibliography website, which is currently looking for support. While Schloss Dagstuhl publishes papers independently, Episciences and OPA both rely heavily on arXiv (supported by Cornell, other universities and you) and HAL (supported by CNRS, Inria, and INRAE).

So without further ado, below are the good places to send your papers in the field of type theory, interactive theorem proving, and dependently typed programming. If you are in a different subfield of computer science, I encourage you to make your own list and publish it somewhere, I would be happy to link it here!

Journals

Conferences and workshops

I would like to thank Meven, Jeremy, and Niels for their contributions to this list!

It was also suggested that I should add the ETAPS conferences (ESOP, FASE, FoSSaCS, and TACAS) to this list. While they are published by a large traditional publisher (Springer), they have a strong open access policy and have negotiated a reasonable rate (180€ per paper) which is fully covered by the conference registrations, so they are no direct costs for authors other than the conference registration (which is mandatory). Notably, SpringerLink does not include any “premium” features such as AI summaries. However, Niels pointed me to an interview with the CEO of Springer from January where he mentions AI as “one of his three strategic priorities”, so I take this with a large grain of salt. Personally, I would not hesitate to send a paper to one of the ETAPS conferences but I don’t think they really set an example of what publishing could be like the options I listed above.

On a personal note, curating this list was a positive way for me to deal with my frustration at AI anti-features being added to more and more services. It feels better to focus on examples of who is doing things right instead of everything that is going wrong. You might have noticed that I have not written anything on my blog here for over a year. I do still get messages from people who got something out of reading one of my older posts (especially the one on being autistic), for which I am really grateful. I hope to come back to blogging more frequently soon, and perhaps even write something about the causes of that hiatus in the next one. In the mean time, please follow me on the Fediverse for slightly more frequent updates!