ACS Publications is pleased to announce the launch of an improved copyright and permissions experience across our journal portfolio.
ACS Publications is pleased to announce the launch of an improved copyright and permissions experience across our journal portfolio.
We are expanding our range of Journal Publishing Agreements to make copyright options clearer and help our authors meet funder requirements, focusing on those agreements attached to open access articles. The change, applicable to all articles in pure open access journals and all open access papers published in hybrid journals, will adopt the Creative Commons license. CC-BY-NC-ND is the default license, and CC-BY is provided as an option. Hence, these agreements will not require copyright transfer to ACS.
From a process standpoint, you will no longer need to submit a completed Journal Publishing Agreement at the submission stage; we will only ask for this once your manuscript has been accepted to an ACS journal. Upon acceptance, you will receive an email with a customized link to complete and sign a Journal Publishing Agreement; from here, we will guide you through the process with a series of questions to help determine the most appropriate agreement for your manuscript.
This new process makes your publishing experience with ACS that much easier by:
- Simplifying the Journal Publishing Agreements, easing author decision-making, and streamlining workflows around submission and acceptance;
- Enabling ACS to continue to offer a range of services and protections to authors who choose to publish articles at no charge under a subscription-access model;
- Conforming with emergent open access community standards and funder requirements regarding copyright ownership and licensing for open access articles.
These new changes are scheduled to launch in early January of 2021. Find out more about the new Journal Publishing Agreement on our dedicated landing page, and refer to the flowchart above to understand the best option for your article.