Fortunately (at least for me), biomedical research these days is largely an exception to this. Thanks to a Bush-era appropriations bill, anyone who takes NIH funding must ensure that their articles are published open-access on PubMedCentral within 12 months of the initial publication. It's not perfect, but it does at least solve the problem with old publications getting locked behind paywalls unreasonable to the value. We also have the PLoS series of journals, which are completely open access and Creative Commons "attribution" licensed.
Agreed. This problem isn't ACM's fault. Professional societies are too dependent upon journal publishers to force significant change. It is Congress that needs to step in and demand that all journal articles produced as a result of any federally-funded research project (not just NIH-funded ones) be subject to the 1 year post-publication open access rule. If Congress does that, then the journals have no choice but to comply or else the authors who supply the content will publish elsewhere.
