Welcome to JACS Au!

The launch of JACS Au (read JACS “gold”) signals the establishment of a new family of open access (OA) journals, broadening the portfolio of OA offerings from the American Chemical Society. Driven by both funding agencies¹⁻³ and author demand,⁴ this expanded portfolio ensures that every researcher in the chemical sciences has multiple options in which to publish their work in the format they choose.

For ACS Publications, JACS Au is a new type of OA journal. JACS Au seeks to share and build upon the greatest attributes of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), leveraging its 140 years of leadership in publishing in the chemical sciences. JACS Au will offer speed, rigor, and impact, three pillars of JACS publications, following the characteristic ACS Publications deployment of active researchers as editors. JACS Au will be a highly selective journal, offering initial peer review by the editorial team, followed by external review by a panel of expert referees. Ultimately, we seek to cover the full breadth of the ACS Publications portfolio, and submissions representing the top 5–10% of publications appearing in ACS specialty journals may be appropriate for JACS Au. Our peer review process, one that will be familiar to most authors and reviewers of ACS Publications, is designed to deliver rigorous peer review and publication of papers with significant impact. However, for authors who have published in high impact OA journals with other publishers, JACS Au will offer a key distinguishing feature. Time to publication, or the time from paper submission to publication on the web, often stretches to 20–30 weeks in high impact OA journals at some publishers. In contrast, JACS Au will offer the characteristic speed and efficiency of ACS Publications, with publication times two- to threefold faster, on average. Thus, JACS Au will make its mark by building on the three core elements of JACS and ACS Publications: speed, rigor, and impact.

The publication of the first issue of JACS Au is accompanied by the launch of a suite of OA specialty journals covering the breadth of the ACS Publications portfolio. Led by Editor-in-Chief Shelley Minteer, this portfolio of nine new OA journals⁵ will ensure all authors who are required or desire to publish fully open access papers have appropriate, rigorous, and respected topical journals in which to publish. These new journals join the two established OA journals in the portfolio. Leading the OA portfolio for ACS Publications, ACS Central Science focuses on the intersection of chemistry with related fields, publishing papers of exceptional impact that find an audience beyond just chemists. Highly selective, this journal is expected to publish a few hundred contributions per year. The other established OA journal, ACS Omega, covers the breadth of the ACS Publications portfolio, is quite large, and requires no expectation of immediate impact from the peer-reviewed science reported.

ACS Publications offers two parallel publication models: the traditional institutional subscription model and an OA model. The subscription model is fully open to all authors, with scientific peer review the only barrier to publication. However, the final published work is available only to those who purchase access, either via a subscription or purchase of the individual article. In the OA model, after peer review, the authors, funders, or authors’ institution(s) pay an article publishing charge, which reflects the cost of publishing the article. As a result, the final peer reviewed product is freely available to everyone with access to the Internet. The combined subscription plus OA portfolio of ACS Publications provides respected, peer-reviewed venues for publication for all authors, including those who are mandated to publish open access by their funders or institutions. As we embrace these new OA offerings, we can imagine a distant future where the entire scientific community—funders, authors, readers—unites behind a single, financially tenable publication model.

The ultimate goal of JACS Au is to balance inclusivity and excellence. We will seek excellence by selecting the most impactful submissions for publication, targeting the scientific rigor and impact expected of a publication in a JACS branded journal. In parallel, we believe that every author should rightfully believe that their best work could appear in the pages of JACS Au. To this end, the editorial team will singularly focus on the quality, rigor, and impact of the science being communicated, with no preference given based on topical area, author, or institutional address. We invite submissions from all segments of the chemistry and chemical engineering community—academia, research organizations, industry, and government—and seek to partner with the global chemistry community in shaping this new journal.

The initial team of Associate Editors (AEs) was chosen to cover a broad swath of chemistry and chemical engineering, with each member being an accomplished researcher as well as leader in their research communities. Carole Duboc of Grenoble Alpes University/CNRS (France) covers inorganic, bioinorganic, and some aspects of physical chemistry, including spectroscopy. Sabine Flitsch of the University of Manchester (UK) handles biochemistry, chemical biology, and medicinal chemistry. Hyunjoo Lee of KAIST (South Korea) covers inorganic materials chemistry, heterogeneous catalysis, and electrochemistry. Nuno Maulide of the University of Vienna (Austria) deals with molecular organic chemistry. Rodney Priestley of Princeton University (United States) handles polymers and soft matter as well as materials physics, broadly speaking. Xin Xu of Fudan University (China) adjudicates most papers that focus on theory and computation in chemistry, including aspects of data science and artificial intelligence. Together, these six experts cover a large range of chemistry and chemical engineering.

Recognizing that one cannot perfectly cover the breadth of chemistry with only six AEs, we have appointed an Editorial Advisory Board with 46 members who offer expertise that spans across the chemical enterprise. Together, the EAB and the team of AEs represent 23 countries and all continents while offering diversity of expertise, career stage, gender, ethnicity, and other attributes. As a team, we vow to offer strong customer service, clearly communicating decisions on the papers we adjudicate, as well as in inquiries from the community.

Initially, a significant fraction of authors may publish in JACS Au because OA is mandated by their institution or funding agency, and they seek a prestigious, high visibility, high impact journal. Others may choose JACS Au because they believe in the OA model, which makes every paper freely available to all of humanity. Still others will want their papers read and cited by as many people as possible, with recent reports showing OA papers cited 18% more, on average, than conventional papers.⁶ Regardless of the motivation for a submission to JACS Au, the editorial team remains dedicated to maintaining the prestige of the JACS brand and the rapid times to publication for which ACS Publications is known. In coupling this with outstanding service and communication from the editorial team, our long-term goal is to create a journal that drives authors to submit to JACS Au irrespective of its OA status. Indeed, this is a unique opportunity, being the first time in over a century that a new journal has been launched with the iconic JACS brand. To this end, we, the broader chemistry and chemical engineering community, should come together to build JACS Au in the image of the ideal journal that we may have imagined but not yet encountered. Together, the community and the editorial team should take collective ownership of the journal to ensure that it lives up to the scientific standards implied by its name while effectively serving the breadth of the global chemistry community. To that end, we invite you, as authors, reviewers, and readers, to join us in building, creating, and shaping JACS Au.

Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.