Beginning July 1, 2025, open access publishing options with the American Chemical Society (ACS) for UC authors are changing. Authors who wish to publish under an open access license on the ACS platform will be responsible for covering the full cost of the discounted Article Processing Charge (APC). This change is due to a number of factors, including high publishing volume and lower-than-anticipated contribution of research funding, which have made the current agreement with ACS unsustainable. The option for authors without available research funding to request full coverage of the APC will end on June 30, 2025.
Authors who are publishing in subscription/hybrid ACS journals may opt out of open access and publish behind a paywall at no additional cost.
Reading access to ACS journals will continue without interruption, essentially reverting to the type of agreement UC had with ACS prior to the open access publishing agreement that began in May 2022.
Why this decision was made:
Cost containment has always been a top priority for UC’s open access agreements. The current agreement with ACS was built on the assumption that if UC authors with research funds available to pay the open access publication fee could help to shoulder their costs, the library could stretch its limited financial resources to make open access publication an option for those authors without available funds. Unfortunately, the percentage of authors contributing research funds toward APCs has decreased to levels well below those of UC’s other agreements operating on a similar principle. The resulting cost increases to the libraries under the model are proving to be unsustainable and we have been unable to find an alternate pathway with ACS that would sustain a UC-supported open access publishing option.
In fall 2024, UC launched an outreach campaign to better understand authors’ decision-making processes when choosing whether and how to publish open access with ACS. Direct outreach was conducted via email to 806 UC authors who 1) published OA in ACS journals but did not contribute grant funds towards the OA fees and 2) opted out of open access altogether. A link to a survey where authors could provide feedback was included in the outreach. The survey did not result in any change in open access uptake or grant participation, and its findings helped inform the decision to revise the open access publishing option with ACS.
How this change will affect UC researchers:
• Reading access to ACS publications will continue without interruption.
• Authors who publish in ACS journals will still be able to make their articles open access, but starting July 1, 2025, full funding support will no longer be available through the UC libraries. Authors will be responsible for covering a single, discounted article processing charge (APC) of $3,000. As always, authors also have the option to deposit their pre-publication, peer-reviewed author accepted manuscript in an open access repository like arXiv or UC’s eScholarship for free.
UC’s open access agreements with other publishers are also unaffected. In fact, author participation rates for UC’s other open access agreements are generally much stronger than in this instance. For researchers who publish in journals covered under these other agreements, open access funding support continues to be available from the UC libraries and we encourage authors to take advantage of it.
For questions about this change with ACS, or about open access publishing options at UC in general, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Jerrold Shiroma (jshiroma@ucmerced.edu).
