American Chemical Society broadens access to its articles

American Chemical Society Publications

The American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, is broadening access to research articles published in its 33 scholarly journals. The Society is introducing two new experimental policies that define how readers can view free digital versions of ACS articles beginning one year after publication.

First, in response to public access guidelines recently released by the NIH1, the ACS will post, for public accessibility 12 months after publication, the peer-reviewed version of authors’ manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central during 2005. The NIH policy encourages authors whose work it funds to submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, the agency’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
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Second, as a value-added service to ACS authors and a method of further opening access to its content, the full-text version of all research articles published in ACS journals will be made available at no charge via an author-directed Web link 12 months after final publication. Allowing unrestricted access to articles 12 months after publication is an expansion of the Society’s current practice of permitting 50 downloads of authors’ articles free of charge during the first year of publication. This initiative will go into effect during 2005.

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