Choosing Open Access with ACS Publications: A Step-by-Step Guide

Open access (OA) is the first choice of many authors and readers around the world, with the number of articles published as immediate OA across all ACS journals growing from almost 16,000 in 2023 to more than 17,000 in 2024. The convenience and immediacy offered by OA is reflected in a growing number of ‘read and publish’ agreements with academic institutions across the world, which aim to provide a simple way for authors to reach the widest possible audience, with their institution covering some or all the costs for OA publishing.

The step-by-step guide below will help you understand your OA options when publishing with ACS, and how to follow the relevant route through from submission to publication.

Jump to Section:
Step One: Understanding mandates
Step Two: Check if your OA fees are covered
Step Three: Choose the OA option you and your co-authors need

Step One: Understanding mandates

Before you submit to an ACS journal, you should confirm if you and your co-authors are required to make your work freely available upon publication. This may be required by your research funder—if that’s the case, your grant should specify the relevant terms.

Your institution may also have a specific policy about depositing your accepted manuscript (the version of your article following peer review, but before it is prepared for publication) or the final version of record (the article as it appears in a journal) in an institutional, subject, or funder repository.

If the policy specifies that only the accepted manuscript needs to be self-archived immediately upon acceptance or publication, this may be referred to as a zero-embargo green open access. Regardless of which route to OA you choose, you and your co-authors will retain copyright on your accepted manuscript.

Any applicable mandate(s) may also specify that a particular type of Creative Commons (CC) license must be applied to the manuscript. ACS offers CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND licenses: you can find more information about these here.

As the corresponding author, it’s your responsibility to ensure that whichever publication route you choose meets the needs of all your co-authors. Having a clear picture of what those requirements are before submitting will help you choose the right combination of journal, OA route, and Creative Commons license.

Step Two: Check if your OA fees are covered

More than 1,600 academic institutions across the world are covered by active read and publish agreements with ACS. These provide full reading access to subscription content, as well as covering open access publishing charges, or providing a significant discount to affiliated authors.

You can check if your institution is covered by an agreement on the ACS Open Science website. The page for your agreement will also let you know which journals are included, and the Creative Commons license(s) that will be applied when publishing through the agreement. You should confirm that the supported option(s) meet the requirements of all your co-authors.

In some cases, your agreement may provide a discount on the standard article publishing charge (APC) for a journal if it’s not fully covered.

As with most other publishers, eligibility for OA publishing under an agreement is based on the submitting corresponding author’s affiliation. Make sure you’ve correctly selected your institution on your profile in the ACS Publishing Center and within your manuscript ahead of submission—you should be notified of your institution’s agreement during the final steps of the publishing process.

If you’re not covered by an institutional agreement, your research funder may allow for publishing charges to be paid from your grant or, in some cases, may make additional funding available for these costs. If this is the case, your grant should include all the relevant information.

Finally, corresponding authors based in low- and lower-middle-income countries automatically qualify for discounts on APCs when publishing in a fully OA journal. You can find more information on our Special Country Pricing page.

You may also choose to pay any applicable article publishing charges with personal funds.

If you don’t wish to publish the version of record as immediate open access, or if you don’t need to self-archive your accepted manuscript within 12 months of publication, no fees are applicable at any point.

Step Three: Choose the OA option you and your co-authors need

Once you know which ACS journal is the best fit for your research, and have a plan for how any applicable charges will be covered, you should choose the OA option that fits you and your co-authors’ requirements:

Gold open access

This is the route you’ll need to follow if you need, or want, to make both the version of record and the accepted manuscript immediately available.

• Ahead of publication: Submit to a fully open access or hybrid journal.
• At acceptance:
  • If your institution has a read and publish agreement: indicate that you want to publish OA under the agreement, and select your preferred CC license (if applicable).
  • If you do not have access to a read and publish agreement: complete payment of the article publishing charge (APC), or bill your funder if they have indicated that they will support OA publication charges. If you’re based in a country eligible for our Special Country Pricing program and are publishing in a fully OA journal, you’ll automatically receive the appropriate discount.
• Upon publication: The version of record will be published as OA. You can also self-archive your accepted manuscript in appropriate repositories.
• After publication: If you’ve previously published an article in an ACS hybrid journal that was not open access at time of publication, you can choose to pay an APC at a later date to make the version of record available as open access (providing at least 12 months have passed). You can find out more here.

Immediate green open access

This is the route you’ll need to follow if you need, or want, to self-archive your accepted manuscript immediately upon acceptance or publication. This process will be also triggered if your manuscript contains your funder- or institution-recommended language about rights retention. When publishing under this route, the version of record will only be accessible to readers with a subscription to the journal.

• Ahead of publication: Submit to a hybrid journal.
• At acceptance:
  • If your institution has a “read and green” agreement: indicate that you would like to retain copyright and immediately deposit the accepted manuscript.
  • If you do not have access to an agreement: complete payment of the article development charge. If you’re based in a country eligible for our Special Country Pricing program, you’ll automatically receive a discount for this charge. Upon payment, you can immediately self-archive your accepted manuscript.
• After publication: if you decide you would like to make the version of record OA at a later time, you can opt to do so. If you’ve already paid an article development charge for zero-embargo green open access, the APC will be discounted by the amount you have already paid for the article development charge – in other words, the most any author will ever pay to publish OA will be capped at the price of the journal’s APC.

Delayed green open access

Do you need, or want, to self-archive your accepted manuscript but can wait 12 months after publication to do so?

• Ahead of publication: Submit to a hybrid journal.
• After publication: You can submit your accepted manuscript to any institutional, funder, or subject repository providing it is embargoed for at least 12 months after the initial publication date in your chosen hybrid journal.

If you’ve like to find out more about publishing open access with ACS, or about how open science can benefit researchers the world over, visit the ACS Open Science site.