ACS Read and Publish Agreements

Supporting the transition to open science

ACS read and publish agreements sustainably support open access publishing by helping authors and institutions meet their publication goals in any of ACS’s premier journals, while ensuring that researchers retain full access to ACS journal content. With an innovative publishing workflow developed in partnership with the Copyright Clearance Center, the agreements give authors and administrators a seamless, time-saving publishing experience and support the open science movement.

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Why choose an ACS read and publish agreement?

ACS has invested in the systems required to enable transformative open access publishing. Our systems are sustainable, cost-effective, and efficient—jointly meeting the needs of authors, funders, subscribing organizations, and ACS as the publisher.
These agreements support authors and institutions as both work to meet funding requirements and make open access their default publishing choice. As of 2024, more than 1,500 institutions in 39 countries benefit from an ACS read and publish agreement.
Institutional open access managers enjoy best-in-class agreement analytics – easily viewing author requests, approvals, denials, and the remaining balance of credits or tokens. Reports can be filtered by article Digital Object Identifier (DOI), date, or author and can be downloaded and shared.
ACS publishes 17 fully open access journals and 70+ hybrid journals. Learn more about publishing open access in our complete portfolio of journals on the ACS Open Science site.

Find out how you can actively participate in the open science movement by offering financial support to your authors who wish to publish open access. At the same time, meet your open access institutional goals with a sustainable model and best-in-class publishing platform.

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ACS pioneered open access publishing technology

In 2014, ACS sought a scalable, comprehensive open access publishing solution that would seamlessly integrate with institutions’ funding approval processes. We partnered with Copyright Clearance Center and co-developed an industry-standard platform that is now the solution of choice for scholarly publishers worldwide.

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Open access publishing by ACS authors is on the rise

Growth in ACS open access authors, articles and downloads has been strong since 2018. Utilizing a proprietary, state-of-the-art open access publishing platform and leveraging our strong partnership with the Copyright Clearance Center, publishing open access with an ACS read and publish agreement is easy for authors and cost-effective for institutions.

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Momentum in ACS read and publish agreements is building

ACS is partnering with more institutions and consortia in more countries worldwide to establish read and publish agreements and drive significant growth in institutionally-sponsored open access publishing.

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Not ready for an ACS read and publish agreement yet?

ACS also offers packages of open access publication credits that allow organizations to purchase these credits at attractive rates.

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What Our Customers Say

After negotiating our transformative read and publish agreement with ACS we were pleased with their outcome-oriented cooperation. ACS Open Access Operations takes on an active role as interface manager: The administrative workflow for handling Open Access publications is now arranged as uncomplicated as possible between the publisher and the institution’s central Open Access unit—without involving authors unnecessarily.”

Max Planck Digital Library

Transforming scholarly communications to encourage open access publishing in high-quality journals has been identified as an important research-related goal at Tulane. So, too, has been accomplishing this goal within more sustainable subscription pricing models. Read and Publish models bring us closer to sustainability by combining subscription and open access article publication costs in a more neutral way that benefits the university as a whole. We are highly encouraged by this arrangement with ACS.”

Andy Corrigan Tulane University

ACS has a unique approach to tackling the industry’s big challenges—they have built a community of institutional partners, authors, and funders, and created a conversation that produces real solutions for the whole ecosystem.”

Gretchen Gasser-Ellis Vice President and Managing Director, Copyright Clearance Center