FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | August 30, 2006

American Chemical Society announces new ACS AuthorChoice open access option

The American Chemical Society’s Publications Division is pleased to announce an important new publishing option in support of the Society’s journal authors who wish or need to sponsor open access to their published research articles.

The ACS AuthorChoice option establishes a fee-based mechanism for individual authors or their research funding agencies to sponsor the open availability of their articles on the Web at the time of online publication.

Under this new policy —to be implemented later this Fall — the ACS, as copyright holder, will enable unrestricted Web access to a contributing author’s publication from the Society’s Web site in exchange for a fixed payment from the sponsoring author. ACS AuthorChoice also will enable such authors to post electronic copies of published articles on their own personal Web sites and institutional repositories for non-commercial scholarly purposes.

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The base fee for the ACS AuthorChoice option will be set at $3,000 during 2006-2007, with significant discounts applied for contributing authors who are members of the American Chemical Society and/or who are affiliated with an ACS subscribing institution. The fee structure will be as follows:

$3,000: Base Fee (authors who are neither ACS members nor affiliated with an ACS subscribing institution)

$2,000: Affiliated Subscriber (non-ACS members affiliated with an ACS subscribing institution)

$1,500: ACS Member (ACS members not affiliated with an ACS subscribing institution)

$1,000: ACS Member and Affiliated Subscriber (ACS members affiliated with an ACS subscribing institution)

The ACS AuthorChoice option will be extended to authors only after peer-review and editorial acceptance of their articles for publication, so as to ensure complete separation between scientific editorial decision-making and economic considerations. Upon an author’s payment to sponsor the ACS AuthorChoice option, the ACS will make the article freely available upon Web publication.

The ACS AuthorChoice option complements the ACS Articles on Request policy, whereby the Society currently provides (free of charge) to all contributing authors a unique URL within the ACS Web site, that they may e-mail to colleagues or post on external Web sites. Those author-directed links are designed to facilitate distribution of an author’s published work to interested colleagues.

The ACS Articles on Request policy now allows 50 limited downloads within the first year, and unlimited access via the same author-directed links 12 months after publication. At a paying author’s choosing, the ACS AuthorChoice option will sponsor immediate open access to an article as soon as it is published on the ACS Web site.

Brian Crawford, Senior Vice President within the ACS Publications Division, said, “The new ACS AuthorChoice option underscores the American Chemical Society’s willingness to experiment with innovative models to broaden access to highly-valued peer-reviewed research in chemistry, while adhering to the highest standards of editorial integrity, quality and service in support of the research activities of the international scientific community. We are pleased that our editors, authors, readers and library customers support the Society’s growing array of publishing activities designed to broaden access and enhance the scholarly communication process worldwide.”

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization, chartered by the U.S. Congress, with a multidisciplinary membership of more than 158,000 chemists and chemical engineers. The Society publishes numerous scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. The ACS Publications Division currently publishes 35 leading peer-reviewed journals in the chemical and related sciences, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, as well as Chemical & Engineering News, the Society's weekly news magazine.

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