Inaugural Editorial for ACS Polymers Au

We are delighted to be writing this first editorial for ACS Polymers Au (pronounced ACS Polymers gold) as its inaugural Editorial team.

As you may know, ACS Polymers Au is one of the nine new gold Open Access journals that the American Chemical Society (ACS) launched in January 2021 to address the publishing needs of researchers around the world who want to or are mandated by their funders to publish in fully open access journals. In this inaugural editorial, we share our personal views on open access, our motivation for taking on this editorial role, our vision for this journal, and what the readers can expect to see from ACS Polymers Au in the coming years.

Our Personal Views on Open Access as Authors, Readers, and Editors of ACS Polymers Au

1. Enabling Open Science

Like many who advocate for open access,¹⁻⁵ we support the principles of open access to promote easy and unhindered dissemination of research. Simply put, we want to share broadly and openly the knowledge that we build as scientists and the discoveries we make in our laboratories with readers around the world, regardless of their financial or educational background and/or access to a library (with/without a subscription to the journals). We want young, curious, and Internet-savvy school kids from around the world to be inspired by reading about an exciting polymer experiment or simulation well before they have access to a university library and its journal subscriptions. We want open and freely accessible science and technology to empower the brilliant global entrepreneurs who want to give back to their (developing) communities through innovation and science and technology ventures. More generally, to help the public believe in science and to understand the methods of investigation and the many positive global impacts of scientific discoveries, we want to make science, literally, be at the fingertips of anyone with access to the Internet.

As research scientists, we also believe in open data sharing and pushing the boundaries to ensure reproducibility in published polymer theory, simulations, and experiments.⁶ We believe open access publishing can reduce some of the barriers to sharing data, protocols, and source codes.

2. Evolution of Scientific Publishing and Introduction of ACS Polymers Au to Address Some of the Current Publishing Needs

Scientific publishing has been changing over the last two decades, shifting from solely subscription-based journals to the current landscape with a mix of hybrid (subscriptions plus open access) journals along with diverse options for open access publishing.^2,7−11 Some of the recent push for open access has been driven by the Plan-S initiative (https://www.coalition-s.org/why-plan-s) that supports the philosophy that scientific research should be shared openly. The open access/Plan-S discussions have triggered a broad range of responses from public/private research funding agencies across the world, with expectations/mandates on funded researchers varying drastically with country and funding agencies. For example, some funders support open access publishing and expect their researchers to have some version of their manuscript to be available to the public freely; this could be as a preprint through arXiv or bioRxiv or ChemRxiv or by depositing the peer-reviewed accepted manuscript in a repository, or by publishing an article in a hybrid journal with an open access license, or likewise in a fully open access journal like ACS Polymers Au. It is worth noting that while preprint servers such as arXiv or bioRxiv or ChemRxiv offer free of cost, fully open access dissemination, in most cases, it is without peer review and, thus, not (yet...) a viable stand-alone option for early career researchers and scientists who are building their portfolio for tenure and promotion in their institutions. Other funders, like the members of cOAlition-S (https://www.coalition-s.org/organisations/) adopt Plan-S principles and mandate their funded investigators to publish fully open access (without an embargo period), covering their article publishing costs only if these researchers satisfy their implementation criteria (https://www.coalition-s.org/guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/). Researchers supported by funders that mandate gold open access publication deserve a reputed and high-quality publishing platform for the dissemination of their work. Given the needs of such researchers in our polymer community for a fully open access (Plan-S compliant) journal, it is timely for ACS to launch ACS Polymers Au with the goal of similar scope and rigorous review standards as the reputed ACS hybrid polymer journals.

Looking to the future, we recognize that the publishing landscape for polymer science is likely to continue to evolve in the next 5–10 years; this may lead toward free and open access preprint servers (e.g., arXiv, bioRxiv, and ChemRxiv) or something analogous to eLife for biomedical researchers (https://elifesciences.org/about) and, perhaps, new types of peer review, as well.¹² But before preprint servers or other alternative platforms become more broadly accepted as the standard route for research dissemination, the polymer science community will have to rework and revise the current evaluation methods for tenure, promotion, and award recognition that heavily rely on the number and quality of peer-reviewed journal publications.

Regardless of how publishing evolves, as of right now, it is best to have both fully open access and hybrid journals as broad options to satisfy and serve diverse situations that polymer researchers face globally, with some at institutions that cannot afford subscriptions and no way to access and read these papers, some at institutions and/or supported by grants that mandate fully open access publications, and some that fall in between.

ACS Polymers Au—Our Vision, Journal Scope, Types of Articles, and Review Standards

Our vision is to build a trusted and respected publishing venue for our colleagues in the global polymer community that need a fully open access journal for their publications while maintaining the same scope, quality, and review standards that have been demonstrated by the reputed hybrid polymer journals (Macromolecules, Biomacromolecules, and ACS Macro Letters). We aim to accomplish that vision through our efforts described next and by maintaining dual roles as inaugural Editors for ACS Polymers Au and as Associate Editors for Macromolecules (Jayaraman)/Biomacromolecules (Klok).

ACS Polymers Au combines the scope of all three ACS hybrid polymer journals (Macromolecules, Biomacromolecules, and ACS Macro Letters) and will publish original, cutting-edge, and impactful research in all areas of macromolecular and soft matter science, including polymer synthesis and modification, polymer characterization, nanotechnology, self-assembly, supramolecular chemistry, energy generation and storage, electronics, photonics, sensing, adaptive materials, membranes, renewable and sustainable materials, biomaterials, and biomedical applications of polymers.

Original submissions to ACS Polymers Au can be in the form of letters or articles and should highlight innovation and advances in the fundamental understanding of polymers; topics can include synthesis; phase behavior, thermodynamics, dynamic phenomena; structure and properties; new state of the art characterization, modeling, simulation, and theoretical methods. ACS Polymers Au will also consider unsolicited or invited original reviews and perspectives on topics within polymer science that satisfy the broad appeal and impact expected from such manuscripts. We strongly encourage authors considering unsolicited reviews/perspectives to reach out to us with proposals to ensure that the focus/topic of their manuscript fits the scope, broad appeal, and high impact we expect of all publications in ACS Polymers Au.

We will uphold the same standards and integrity of peer review that are known and have become widely appreciated for Macromolecules, Biomacromolecules, and ACS Macro Letters for all submissions, regardless of the manuscript type—letters/articles/reviews/perspectives, unsolicited or invited, and promptly communicate to the authors our editorial decisions and justifications in an open and transparent manner.

Announcements from ACS Polymers Au

1. Editorial Advisory Board

We are thrilled to announce our inaugural Editorial Advisory Board (Table 1), which is composed of outstanding researchers in the polymer science community from around the world. These members will serve to represent the diverse voices and views of fellow polymer researchers in different countries, at different stages of their careers, and working on different subfields within polymer science. Understanding these diverse views on polymer research, scientific writing, reviewing, publishing, and open access will guide us and future editors of ACS Polymers Au.

Table 1. Members of the Inaugural Editorial Advisory Board of ACS Polymers Au.

name	institution	country
Tanja Junkers	Monash University	Australia
Helen Tran	University of Toronto	Canada
Orlando Rojas	The University of British Columbia	Canada
Hua Lu	Peking University	China
Costantino Creton	CNRS, ESPCI Paris, Université PSL	France
Robert Göstl	DWI - Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials	Germany
Lutz Nuhn	Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research	Germany
Tanja Weil	Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research	Germany
Manickam Jayakannan	Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, IISER, Pune	India
Keiji Numata	Kyoto University	Japan
Moon Jeong Park	Pohang University of Science & Technology, POSTECH	Korea
Nikos Hadjichristidis	King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST	Saudi Arabia
Kwan Tan	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore
Anna Finne Wistrand	KTH Royal Institute of Technology	Sweden
Athina Anastasaki	ETH Zurich	Switzerland
Andrew Dove	University of Birmingham	UK
Rachel O’Reilly	University of Birmingham	UK
Matthew I. Gibson	University of Warwick	UK
Christopher A. Alabi	Cornell University	USA
Lilo D. Pozzo	University of Washington	USA
Chinedum Osuji	University of Pennsylvania	USA
Ryan Hayward	University of Colorado, Boulder	USA
Timothy P. Lodge	University of Minnesota	USA
Jan Genzer	North Carolina State University	USA
Kathyrn L. Beers	National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST Gaithersburg	USA

2. Special Issues and Spotlights

In the early years of ACS Polymers Au, we plan to showcase the scope of ACS Polymers Au through peer-reviewed publications that highlight the impactful science conducted in the laboratories led by our Editorial Advisory Board members and many outstanding scientists and researchers at all career stages from around the world. We are particularly looking forward to our 2021 Rising Stars in Polymers virtual issue, which will be a collection of invited peer-reviewed published articles/letters coming from research laboratories led by brilliant early career researchers from around the world. We will be releasing this virtual issue in early 2022. Another exciting virtual issue we will be releasing in 2022 is on Grand Challenges in Polymers, which will be a collection of invited forward-looking perspectives from pioneers of various subfields in polymer science from around the world. Additionally, on a regular basis, in consultation with our Editorial Advisory Board, in our Editorials, we will “spotlight” selected publications (regular articles/letters) that we consider to be presenting truly ground-breaking research in polymer science.

3. Global Webinar Events

To celebrate the launch of open access journals, ACS has been hosting webinars that cover science as well as open access. For example, the webinar hosted on March 8, 2021, called “How to Publish Open Access with Support from Your Institution”, had presentations from Dr. Lynn Kamerlin, a researcher who publishes open access with support from her institution (Uppsala, Sweden) and Sybille Geisenheyner from ACS sharing information about Read + Publish agreements (https://acsopenscience.org/read-publish-agreements/).

Specifically, to highlight polymers and ACS’s portfolio of gold open access journals, on April 29, 2021, ACS publications will host a global 1 h webinar on Grand Challenges in Polymer Science and Soft Materials with three speakers leading polymer research in Europe and the Americas (https://connect.acspubs.org/PolymersGrandChallengesWebinar); this will be followed by another such webinar with speakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific nations. Through such global webinars, we will learn about cutting-edge polymers and soft matter research that is addressing many of society’s grand challenges and the role that open science can play in enabling solutions/dissemination of solutions to these grand challenges.

Future Outlook

We sign off this editorial with excitement about what is ahead of us, and we look forward to working with you as an author, a reviewer, an Editorial Advisory Member, and a reader of ACS Polymers Au.

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