Open Science
ACS Publications has read and publish agreements with more than 500 institutions in the United States. Read more about how these agreements have resulted in a 147% growth in open access publishing from US authors.
2024 was a landmark year for ACS Publications' open access initiatives in the United States: for the first time, over 29% of all original research articles from US-based authors across all of our journals were published as immediate open access under Creative Commons licenses.
The quantity of open access articles published in ACS journals by US authors has nearly tripled in the past three years alone, from around 1,400 articles in 2021 (roughly 11% of all US-authored articles) to more than 3,500 articles in 2024 (29% of all US-authored articles). This growth has been driven by a combination of strong institutional support for open access publication and an increasing number of research funders putting strong OA or public access policies into place. Even among profound changes in the federal landscape, there is evidence of continued support for policies that support broader access to published research, with an even greater proportion of articles by US authors published in ACS journals being made immediately accessible under open access licenses in the opening months of 2025.
Beginning with two initial agreements in 2020, our read and publish program in the US has grown to 29 institutional open access agreements that cover more than 500 individual institutions and thousands of researchers stretching from coast to coast. As a result, of the 3500 open access articles from US based authors in ACS Publications journals in 2024, more than 70% were covered by a read and publish agreement.
This includes our ACS-sponsored read and publish program for primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). Since its establishment in 2023, the program has grown to cover more than 180 institutions in almost 2/3 of US states and has resulted in over 200 open access articles from authors who may otherwise have lacked the funding to publish their work as open access. You can find out more about the program, including links to some of the most popular papers published by authors at participating PUIs, in this Axial article.
The graphs below demonstrate the strong growth that ACS Publications' open access programs have experienced in the US across the past three years:
More broadly, subscription content published in ACS journals has also grown significantly over the past few years. While open access content represents just under one quarter of all original research articles published in ACS journals during 2024, the absolute number of non-OA articles published each year has grown by 15% since 2021 from around 48,800 to more than 56,300 articles:
The growth of both open access and subscription content demonstrates that even as open access is embraced by more and more authors, regional trends, legislative support, and researcher preferences continue to drive growth of non-OA content as well. ACS Publications is committed to supporting both open access publication and subscription content for the foreseeable future, with read and publish agreements providing institutions with comprehensive coverage.