The Electrochemical Society (ECS) has announced its third annual Free the Science Week to be held on April 1-7, 2019. ECS will take down the paywall to its entire online collection of published research. For the duration of the week, the ECS Digital Library, which contains over 151,000 scientific articles and abstracts, will be freely accessible to everyone.
Launched in 2015, the Free the Science initiative is ECS’s vision for transformative, industry-wide change in the traditional methods of communicating scholarly research. Based on the fundamental tenet that research should be free for readers to access and free for authors to publish, the initiative represents the Society’s ongoing, community-driven push toward a future that embraces open science.
ECS currently supports open access publishing in its two peer-reviewed journals, the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology, with a discount program for its open access article processing charges.
Through the program, ECS provides article credits to various members of its community - Society members, authors of certain types of articles, and authors affiliated with institutions subscribed to the Society’s read-and-publish subscription package, ECS Plus, which by now boasts a subscription base of over 1,000 institutions.
ECS’s support of open access as a publishing option has had a pivotal impact upon Society publishing. Since ECS began offering open access as a publishing option in 2014, over 35 percent of its journal articles have been published open access. Over 90 percent of those articles were published at no cost to authors, thanks to the over $2.1 million in article processing charge credits the Society provided.
In recent months, amid discussions of Plan S, ECS’s Free the Science initiative has drawn attention from the key players in the publishing industry.
Interested parties may access ECS research for free during the week in the ECS Digital Library.
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