Computational Linguistics became an open access journal

Old news but good news if you hadn't already heard it. :) ACL has always had relatively open publication policies; the anthology has been online for years, and even when there was a print version of CL the articles were online too (maybe with an embargo of a month or two, but you could also go to the authors' websites and grab the PDF there).

I was in for a big shock when I realised that non-NLP papers (i.e. those published through ACM) were hard to find online and often required payment---all through grad school I just looked up everything I needed online (for free). It felt like a big step into the stone age when I had to start dealing with ACM policies.

I wish I had had this 10 years ago when I worked in the field.

Fantastic!

there's always the Anthology, keep you busy for a couple hours at least

http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/

Yup. ACL Anthology is a big compendium of many journals and conference proceedings in Computational Linguistics and NLP. Getting CL as an open access is great too, though most libraries had their subscriptions.

!!! It's like Christmas in May, or a really early birthday! This makes me very happy!