The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and JISC Collections have announced an agreement. Under the deal, the two will make the ACS Legacy Archives, a digital collection of 22 peer-reviewed journal titles, widely available to universities, colleges and research councils in the UK. Researchers, teaching staff and students will now have sponsored access to 117 years of chemistry content contained within nearly 1,000 published ACS journal archive volumes. These encompass about 0.5 million articles published by the society during the period 1879 to 1995.
The ACS Legacy Archives covers more than 180 published Nobel laureates in chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine. This includes renowned scientists such as Linus Pauling, Irving Langmuir, Carl and Gerty Cori, Elias J. (EJ) Corey, Ahmed Zewail, Rudolph Marcus, Percy Julian, Donald J. Cram, Stanley Prusiner and Selman Waksman.
The licence agreement is seen to provide widespread and permanent access to an important scholarly resource that otherwise would only have been available to researchers located at a small number of academic institutions. It is expected that researchers throughout the UK will benefit from ease of online access to the archive, and scholars will save both the time and expense of travelling to review this literature at other institutions. Titles contained within the archive include some of the most highly-cited journals in the field, including Chemical Reviews, the Society's flagship Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Journal of Organic Chemistry.
Access to the archive has been secured for the UK education and research community at a national level by JISC Collections, following an open procurement process with criteria set by the academic community. All the bids received from publishers were marked and ranked by the community according to their academic quality, value for money and the willingness of the participants to meet the user needs of the JISC community. The central licensing arrangement achieved via this procurement process provides individual institutions with the freedom to choose how best to provide access based on the needs of their staff, students and researchers. The aim is to enrich their research experience without concern for affordability of information access.
