The Electrochemical Society (ECS) is celebrating its fifth annual Free the Science Week from April 5-11, 2021, by taking down the paywall to the ECS Digital Library. All through the week, the Society’s online collection of published research will be freely accessible to everyone. The ECS Digital Library is hosted on IOPscience and includes over 160,000 scientific journal and magazine articles and meeting abstracts. The Journal of The Electrochemical Society, the oldest peer-reviewed journal in its field, is also part of the collection.
Launched in 2015, the Free the Science initiative is the Society’s vision for transformative, industry-wide change in the traditional methods of communicating scholarly research. Based on the fundamental principle 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 to a future embracing open science.
ECS’s support for open access has impacted Society publishing significantly. Since ECS began offering open access as a publishing option in 2014, over 35 percent of all journal content has been published as open access—and 47 percent of articles published in 2020 were open access.
The Society’s two peer-reviewed journals, the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology, promote open access publishing. Authors whose work is chosen for publication in these journals may select to publish their article as part of the Author Choice Open Access program. This means that their article is freely available online to anyone who wishes to see it. The reader neither has to pay for it directly, nor belong to an institution that subscribes to the journal in which it appears.
To participate in the program, authors pay an article processing charge (APC) or use an article credit. Article credits are available to authors associated with ECS Institutional Members. Authors affiliated with ECS Plus subscribing institutions have unlimited no-cost open access publishing.
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