For the last five years, ACS Publications has offered authors the ability to publish in two families of journals, our long-established family of journals that is available to readers through subscription as well as a newer family of open access (OA) journals where all published work is freely available to readers across the world. As part of the latter family of journals, the ACS Au open access journals were launched in 2021, greatly expanding ACS Publications’ first forays into open access publishing that started with the launch of ACS Central Science (2015) and ACS Omega (2016). The ACS Au family of journals includes a large, selective multidisciplinary chemistry journal, JACS Au, serving as a companion to the flagship Journal of the American Chemical Society, and nine fully open access community focused journals covering the breadth of the chemical, biochemical, materials, environmental, and engineering disciplines.
The launch of the ACS Au journal family further emphasizes ACS’ commitment to supporting authors who choose, or are required by their funder, to publish in fully open access journals. As open access mandates continue to evolve around the world, we have continuously sought to provide authors with the options they need to publish their work in journals that feature high scientific rigor, thorough peer review, global impact and reach, and timely editorial decisions. Five years later, the journals are well-established and will continue to serve their communities as respected venues for high-quality research in chemistry and the allied fields.
Recognizing that different authors have different accessibility to funding for Article Publication Charges (APCs), ACS also continues to support authors through the ACS special country pricing policy and ACS Read and Publish Agreements. Read and Publish agreements help institutions sustainably support the transition to open access, by growing the amount of work published open access, while also providing full access to ACS subscription content. Over the past five years, the number of ACS Read and Publish Agreements has expanded substantially, from covering 125 institutes in seven countries in 2019 to over 1,600 institutes across 46 countries in 2024 (Figure 1). 2024 also saw the establishment of first-of-their-kind “Read and Green” agreements to further expand the open access options ACS Publications provides for authors. We are delighted that ACS remains committed to expanding these agreements, enabling more authors to publish their work open access and for it to be available to anyone, anywhere in the world.
Figure 1.
Growth of ACS Read and Publish Agreements since 2019.
With such widespread and continually expanding coverage by Read and Publish agreements, authors based at many institutions around the world are choosing to publish open access even when their institutions or funding agencies do not require it. This is because open access papers and journals offer wider accessibility of published work, and authors naturally seek the broadest possible audience for their research products. Evidence for the increased usage can be seen in Figure 2, where the usage of hybrid ACS publications journals is dominated by researchers in East Asia and the Pacific (53%), the Western Hemisphere (21%), and Europe (19%), whereas usage of the Au family of journals includes a much stronger presence of readers in South Asia (15% vs 6% hybrid), the Middle East and North Africa (4.5% vs 1.2% hybrid), and Africa (1.5% vs 0.4% hybrid). All ten ACS Au journals received their inaugural full Journal Impact Factors (JIF) in the 2024 Journal Citation Reports, and with usage and citations continuing to grow year-on-year, it is anticipated that the momentum will continue as more researchers embrace open access publishing.
Figure 2.
Global usage comparison of papers published in the ACS hybrid journal portfolio vs ACS gold open access journal portfolio 2021–2024.
The fully open access ACS Au journals have evolved to be highly author-centric. For instance, as a new journal, JACS Au is more than 10-fold smaller than the well-established Journal of the American Chemical Society, which allows our editorial team to invest substantial time understanding the nuance of each submission. In parallel, the Au community journals focus strongly on serving the needs of their respective scientific communities. As scientific communities are diverse, there have been numerous strategies employed to meet the needs of authors across the ten Au journals. For example, several editorials have been published across the portfolio that support authors by providing writing tips (DOI: 10.1021/acsnanoscienceau.2c00030), educating the community about giving proper CRediT (DOI: 10.1021/acsphyschemau.2c00029), and providing strategies for improving the visibility of publications (DOI: 10.1021/acsmeasuresciau.2c00029). We have also leaned into the artistic creativity of our authors through editorials helping them with strategies for making cover art, and we have actively participated in the ACS Publications DEIR cover art series (DOIs: 10.1021/acsbiomedchemau.2c00028; 10.1021/acsorginorgau.2c00060; 10.1021/acsmeasuresciau.2c00060; 10.1021/jacsau.2c00707; 10.1021/acsenvironau.3c00042; 10.1021/acsphyschemau.3c00034; 10.1021/acsmaterialsau.4c00009). As the Au journals started during the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned quickly that a feeling of community is important for chemists and that our communities were looking for more than just advice on publishing. To this end, we have also provided editorials focused on mental health (10.1021/acspolymersau.2c00062) and strategies for fostering healthy, inclusive research ecosystems (10.1021/acsphyschemau.3c00069; 10.1021/jacsau.2c00056).
Another author- and reader-centric activity has been our focus on chemical education. Chemical education is critically important to the future of all chemists and our chemistry discipline, but traditionally, this topic has been primarily represented within the ACS Publications portfolio in the Journal of Chemical Education. The Au family of journals has the benefit that all content is available to anyone, anywhere in the world. Embracing this global reach, we have sought to publish interesting and innovative work on the pedagogy and scholarship of chemical education as well as new training materials of interest and value to researchers and educators across the globe who may not have access to ACS content through subscription. We have sought to ensure that the chemical education research community has a welcoming place to publish their latest research (DOIs: 10.1021/jacsau.4c00227; 10.1021/jacsau.3c00192), and we have supported the field through editorials and resources for educators. We have highlighted new teaching materials and cooperatives that help educators get the support and materials they need (DOIs: 10.1021/acsnanoscienceau.1c00020; 10.1021/acsmeasuresciau.2c00014), and we have published open access tutorials and methods/protocols that can be used directly as alternatives or supplements to costly textbooks in undergraduate and graduate courses (DOIs: 10.1021/acsmeasuresciau.2c00070; 10.1021/jacsau.4c00979). Finally, ACS has made a commitment to chemical educators at primarily undergraduate educational institutions with an ACS-sponsored Read and Publish agreement that waives the APC so that chemists can publish undergraduate research at over 170 institutions across the United States.
Growing visibility and building relationships with the scientific communities we serve have been crucial for the ACS Au portfolio in these formative years. We have undertaken a number of initiatives to grow the number and diversity of publications in the journals and to celebrate this great content. It was also important to us that researchers at all career stages felt like they were represented. We have established an Early Career Advisory Board at JACS Au and the “Rising Stars” Special Issue series in the ACS Au community journals. Initiatives highlighting the researchers shaping the future of their fields will continue to be a feature of the Au journals into our future.
As we close out this editorial, we would be remiss not to thank the numerous individuals and groups that have contributed to the growth and success of the Au family of journals. This includes our retired Editors and recently appointed Editors (Tables 1 and 2), as well as our dozens of dedicated Editorial Advisory Board members across the family of Au journals. We thank the authors who boldly submitted papers to our journals in the early days when global understanding of OA publishing was still limited, as well as our repeat authors who now, after five years, have published with us numerous times, in some cases more than a half dozen papers across the last four years. Finally, we have to thank all our referees. Peer review is the backbone of rigorous scientific publishing, and manuscripts published by ACS Publications are the most trusted, most cited, and most read because of the quality of our peer reviews and peer reviewers. Thank you to all the reviewers who have helped make the Au family of journals thrive.
Table 1. Editors Who Have Completed Their Tenures with the Au Family of Journals.
| Name | Organization or Institute | Journal | Role | Tenure dates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wasiu Lawal | American Chemical Society | JACS Au | Managing Editor | 2020–2022 |
| Nuno Maulide | University of Vienna | JACS Au | Associate Editor | 2020–2024 |
| Livia Eberlin | Baylor College of Medicine | JACS Au | Topic Editor | 2023–2024 |
| Stuart Conway | UCLA | ACS Bio& Med Chem Au | Associate Editor | 2021–2023 |
| Arthi Jayaraman | University of Delaware | ACS Polymers Au | Deputy Editor | 2021–2023 |
| Harm-Anton Klok | EPFL | ACS Polymers Au | Associate Editor | 2021–2023 |
| Keri Hornbuckle | University of Iowa | ACS Environmental Au | Associate Editor | 2021–2024 |
Table 2. Recently Appointed Editors in the Au Family of Journals.
| Name | Institute | Journal | Role | Tenure Dates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Takashi Ooi | Nagoya University | JACS Au | Associate Editor | 2025–present |
| Sebastien Perrier | University of Warwick | ACS Polymers Au | Deputy Editor | 2024–present |
| Eva Marie Harth | University of Houston | ACS Polymers Au | Associate Editor | 2024–present |
| Matthias Gehringer | University of Tübingen | ACS Bio& Med Chem Au | Associate Editor | 2025–present |
| Xing-Fang Li | University of Alberta | ACS Environmental Au | Associate Editor | 2025–present |
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.