The ACM Digital Library contains a comprehensive archive of the organizations journals magazines and conference proceedings. Online services include a forum called Ubiquity and Tech News digest. ACM requires the copyright of all submissions to be assigned to the organization as a condition of publishing the work. Authors may post the documents on their own websites but they are required to link back to the digital librarys reference page for the paper. Though authors are not allowed to charge for access to copies of their work downloading a copy from the ACM site requires a paid subscription. Competition ACMs primary historical competitor has been the IEEE Computer Society which is the largest subgroup of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The IEEE focuses more on hardware and standardization issues than theoretical computer science but there is considerable overlap with the ACMs agenda. They occasionally cooperate on projects like developing computer science curricula.

There is also a mounting challenge to the ACMs publication practices coming from the open access movement. Some authors see a centralized peerreview process as less relevant and publish on their home pages or on unreviewed sites like arXiv. Other organizations have sprung up which do their peer review entirely free and online such as Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research JAIR Journal of Machine Learning Research JMLR and the Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology. The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council of the Association for Computing Machinery in to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. There are presently about Fellows out of about professional members.

Custom software development
Custom software development also known as custom software engineering defines omitting of predeveloped template or boxed solutions and views. If a customer wants to believe that their favour is unique and putting their ideas into practice custom software development technologies are custom approaches to solving their problems. Finding new creative decisions in order to meet the specific requirements and preferences of the customer as quickly as possible may be achieved with custom software development. A goal of custom software solutions may be to develop not for the mass auditorium users but rather developed to be unique for a single customer user or a group. Custom developed software is encouraged to take under one hat the most progressive technologies alone with preferences and expectations of the customer. Custom developed software may be designed in stage by stage processes allowing all nuances and possible hidden dangers to be taken into account including issues which were not mentioned in the specifications. Predeveloped software packages in most cases may not be modifiable or customized to ones needs and are usually available to all unrelated users or groups of users. For software designed for a cell phone manufacturer would be custom even though there could be thousands of individual users. Software written for use by many other manufacturers would be packaged even if there were only a single user in each factory. Software Development Companies Worldwide provide custom programming and software engineering services. Most of the companies have a wide experience in custom database programming distributed website and web application development etc.

Potential Problems

Underlying potential problems risks and unavoidable costs may occur regarding custom software development. Custom developed software implies both high cost and high risk. When a customer purchases custom developed software he might face the fact that there are some certain problems with installing the software and adopting it to that customers needs and purposes. Sometimes it takes time to manage these issues causing losses of time efforts and money. But it can be called a force majeure as no software solution will ever be able to predict every possible complication. Custom developed software is often an expensive undertaking. However it is rare that a predeveloped solution will be able to meet all of a particular customers preferences and requirements as much as a customized software solution.