The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced a landmark transformative “read and publish” agreement with the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (Crue) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Under the deal, researchers affiliated with institutions of Crue and the CSIC will now be able to publish their research articles open access with no additional costs.
With this agreement, ACS continues to actively support the European academic market, having similar agreements with 328 other institutions in over 20 countries. Researchers in European markets increasingly find themselves required to publish open access. To meet this need, ACS is leading the way in developing transformative agreements that enable institutions to ensure their researchers can publish in the world’s premier chemistry journals and meet their funders’ terms.
Across Europe, funders have recently begun implementing new requirements for the researchers to whom they provide funding. Many researchers must now publish only in fully “gold” journals –– journals that are 100% open access. However, for a transitional period, researchers at institutions with a transformative read and publish agreement can continue to publish in hybrid journals, including prestigious titles, such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
A read and publish agreement is just one way that ACS serves its author community. Supporting authors is a priority for ACS, and in order to facilitate an easy transition to open access for its authors, CSIC and Crue’s researcher communities will benefit from ACS’ automated author workflows and its integration with RightsLink for Scientific Communications from Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). RightsLink is an advanced open access agreement management solution that simplifies affiliations and workflow and provides unique insight through data. The service drives collaboration, partnership and innovation in the evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem of publishers, authors, funders and institutions.
Recognizing that demand for completely open access journals is growing, both because of researchers’ changing attitudes toward open access and the nature of funder requirements, ACS has significantly and strategically expanded its portfolio of gold open access journals.
In addition to meeting funder mandates, open access helps authors reach a wider audience. From 2018 to 2020, downloads of open access articles at ACS more than doubled. ACS’ existing open access journals, ACS Central Science and ACS Omega, were accessed over 20 million times last year, proving the importance of open access to researchers around the world. JACS Au and the ACS Au portfolio will help ACS serve an even larger audience of researchers, students and chemists around the world.
Click here to read the original press release.
