ACS Institutional Open Accsss Agreements
Supporting the transition to open science
ACS open access 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.
Why choose an ACS institutional open access 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 2025, more than 1,500 institutions in 49 countries benefit from ACS institutional open access agreements.
- 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 nearly 20 fully open access journals and more than 70 hybrid journals. Learn more about publishing open access in our complete portfolio of journals on the ACS Open Science site.
Types of institutional open access agreements
- Read and publish agreement: ACS read and publish agreements provide full access to ACS Publications’ subscription journal content, plus immediate open access publishing for affiliated corresponding authors, and support for immediate self-archiving.
These agreements include centralized coverage of open access article publishing charges (APCs), or significantly discounted APCs. Institutions may choose to provide APC coverage for some, or all, ACS Publications journals. - Read and green agreement: ACS read and green agreements provide full access to ACS Publications’ subscription journal content, plus support for immediate self-archiving of the accepted manuscript in institutional, subject, and/or funder repositories.
Institutions may also choose to provide discounted article publishing charges (APCs) for affiliated submitting corresponding authors.
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.
Contact your ACS sales representative directly to review your options.
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.
View the infographicMomentum in ACS institutional open access agreements is building
ACS is partnering with more institutions and consortia in more countries worldwide to establish open access agreements and drive significant growth in institutionally-sponsored open access publishing.
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Not ready for an full institutional open access 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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