UCSC is now one of nearly 60 institutions part of an open access publishing agreement with the American Chemical Society (ACS), the University of California, the California State University (CSU) system, and members of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC). ACS is the fourth largest publisher of scholarly journal articles by researchers in the UC system and publishes over 75 journals.

Which articles and types of publications are covered in this agreement?

All articles published between July 1, 2022 and December 31, 2025 in any ACS journal are eligible.

Open access payment workflows with ACS will be implemented July 1, 2022. For articles accepted between January 1, 2022 and July 1, 2022, authors will have the opportunity to retrospectively make their article open.

What does this mean to you as an author?

The goal of this agreement is to help authors publish articles open access with ACS. Unlike other UC open access publishing agreements, the discounted open access cost is either (a) paid fully by the library, or (b) paid by the author who has research funds sufficient to pay the full article processing charge (APC). In this agreement, you may take one of two paths:  

• “I don’t have funds to cover open access.” The University libraries will cover the total open access fee for your article, ensuring that funding does not present a barrier to authors who want to publish open access with ACS.
• “I have research funds to publish my article open access.” If you plan to publish open access with ACS and have funds available to do so, you may pay the discounted APC – not to exceed $3,000.

Please see more details about the article payment process.

Will we still be able to read all of the ACS journals?

Yes. UCSC affiliates will have full reading access to all ACS journals.

How do I get help?

Please reach out to the University Library at research@library.ucsc.edu with questions, and see the ACS agreement FAQ.

More OA Publishing Support

This ACS agreement is one of 13 open access publishing agreements that the UC negotiated for our authors. There are 12 other agreements across the disciplines: ACM, Biochemical Society/Portland Press, Cambridge University Press, Canadian Science Publishing, Company of Biologists, Elsevier, JMIR Publications, National Academy of Sciences, PLoS, Royal Society, Springer Nature, and Wiley. We also have open access publishing discounts with a number of publishers.