Three California consortia, representing nearly 60 academic and research institutions, and the Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) have announced the first-ever California-wide transformative open access agreement. It is also ACS’ first “read and publish” agreement in the U.S. composed of multiple consortia. Through a partnership with the 10-campus University of California (UC) system, the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system, and 25 subscribing institutions represented by the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), readers and researchers at dozens of California research institutions will be able to benefit from full access to subscription content while receiving support for open access publication in ACS’ portfolio of more than 75 premier chemistry journals.
The agreement lasts through 2025 and is a collaboration between institutions with a variety of needs. It exemplifies how a multiparty deal can satisfy the needs of diverse organizations via a transformative agreement. The arrangement is unique, in that it engages funder support for open access in alignment with the partnership between the institutes and publisher. As the scholarly publishing industry transitions toward an open-access future, innovations like this partnership will be crucial to ensuring that all educational institutions and their researchers can participate in the full benefits of open-access publication.
ACS is the fourth-largest publisher of scholarly journal articles by researchers in the UC system, which includes 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Making it easier and more affordable for those researchers to publish open access brings a potential for expanded visibility to their important scientific discoveries. Because the institutions involved collectively publish more than 11% of the nation's scholarly journal articles and deliver instruction to more than 1 million California students, the impact of this agreement will be felt widely across the chemistry community.
A read and publish agreement is a way for institutions to maintain access to scholarly content available only through subscription while supporting the transition to open access publishing by their affiliated researchers. Institutions are, in effect, redirecting their expenditures on subscriptions to cover the open-access article publication charges. Through this partnership, hundreds of researchers at 58 institutions will be supported as they publish open access at a discounted rate in any ACS journal.
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