Scott Delman’s opinion piece in Communications of the ACM makes an argument that’s easy to agree with once it’s stated and easy to miss if you only think about this from the licensing side. Now Is the Time to Give LLMs Access to the ACM Digital Library describes the ACM as having been deliberately cautious about letting AI systems into its peer-reviewed corpus, prioritizing the integrity of the library and the interests of its own authors over rushing to monetize access. Delman is explicit that licensing revenue isn’t the primary motivation for the piece. The worry runs the other direction: if trusted, vetted scholarship stays outside the AI ecosystem while lower-quality material gets ingested anyway, the tools people increasingly use to find and synthesize research will simply underrepresent the work that was actually rigorous.
That’s a real and specific risk, not a hypothetical one. Delman points to hallucination and misattribution as the mechanism, arguing that models trained without access to the best-vetted source material will still answer confidently, just with worse sourcing, and that distorts how a field’s own findings get represented back to the people asking about them. The result isn’t that ACM research disappears. It’s that it becomes what he calls a repository of record that increasingly few of the systems people actually query ever draw from, which is a strange kind of obscurity for material that’s supposed to represent the discipline’s best-checked work.
What’s notable about the piece is that it isn’t arguing for reckless ingestion either. Delman wants governance and rights management attached to whatever access gets granted, which is a harder position to hold than either extreme: not “keep everything locked down” and not “open the archive to any crawler that asks.” That middle position is also the more defensible one, because the actual failure mode isn’t “AI companies get access to peer-reviewed research.” It’s “AI companies build the tools people rely on for finding research, using whatever source material was easiest to obtain first,” and cautious institutions staying on the sidelines indefinitely doesn’t prevent that outcome. It just decides who gets left out of it.
The piece reads as an institution working through a genuine trade-off in public rather than defending a settled position, and that’s worth more than the specific policy recommendation. Caution isn’t the mistake here. Treating caution as costless, as something that can be maintained indefinitely without consequence, is closer to the actual risk Delman is naming.