ACS Central Science – our first fully open access journal – celebrates its first birthday this week. It was one year ago, at the ACS spring meeting in Denver, that the journal debuted. Today ACS Central Science is living up to its promise to highlight and communicate research articles that epitomize the “centrality of chemistry.” Every issue […]

The journal marked its first anniversary with a symposium at the 2016 spring meeting in San Diego, featuring Josh SwamidassAshley SpiesThomas Miller IIINuria Lopez and Alán Aspuru-Guzik, not to mention a little celebratory cake.

Editor-in-Chief Carolyn Bertozzi penned an editorial in honor of the occasion, “Happy Birthday, ACS Central Science!” Bertozzi is an ardent champion of open science, and she drives that point home here, writing:

“Unlike any multidisciplinary chemistry journal before us, right from day one we made ACS Central Science, designed to publish the best research, wholly open access and freely available to readers and authors. See an article of interest in our Twitter feed? Click on it and you are in—no subscription fees, VPN gymnastics or institutional affiliations necessary. This is a convenience for people like me, but essential for our readers who work in settings lacking resources for journal access and for citizens who are not scientists but want to learn more about how chemistry impacts their everyday lives. In this regard, ACS Central Science can be a powerful vehicle for elevating the visibility of chemistry in the world at large.”

Bertozzi celebrates the variety of research appearing in ACS Central Science. The journal is home to both genre-defying interdisciplinary studies marrying very different fields of chemistry as well as ground-breaking papers in core chemistry subjects. She also has positive things to say about the publishing enterprise:

“The journal’s first year of publication was also my first as an Editor, a personally and professionally enriching experience that I continue to embrace with gusto. Work in the trenches of scientific publishing stretches your brain in all kinds of new directions. I learned more chemistry reading a year of ACS Central Science submissions than in the three decades prior. Some of this newfound knowledge has infiltrated the classes I teach. I met more people from more diverse backgrounds—ACS staff, other editors, publishers, writers and reporters, as well as scientists around the globe—than any academic job could deliver. The experience has also tuned me in to professional opportunities that can benefit my students and postdocs, both past and present. I was surprised by how much there is to learn about publishing, even after one has published hundreds of papers from the other side of the table.”

We wish Carolyn and everyone involved with ACS Central Science a happy first birthday.

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