ACS institutional agreements support both access to subscription content and multiple open access pathways, helping researchers publish and share their work more widely while staying compliant with evolving funder mandates.
Institutional Open Access (OA) agreements have been part of the publishing landscape for many years. These agreements between publishers and academic institutions are designed to be a way both to provide reading access to essential content, and a sustainable way for institutions to provide support for members of their researcher community who want (or need) to make the results of their research immediately available without barriers to access.
ACS Publications offers several flexible approaches for institutional OA agreements, and as of early 2026 these cover over 2,000 institutions around the world, including institutions in all 50 US states.
Reading access as standard
We publish over 90 journals in chemistry and related disciplines, containing much of the most trusted, most cited, and most read content in science. Our journals are viewed as essential to the work and studies of millions of readers around the world, and our institutional agreements provide access to all ACS publications at their core.
These agreements are one of the main driving factors in the growth of open access content: as of 2025, over 1/4 of new content in ACS Publications journals is open access, all of which is free for readers around the world to read in perpetuity.
With such a rapid expansion of OA, it's easy to lose sight of the growth of content that still requires a subscription to access—but this has grown by more than 23% in last five years (from around 49,000 articles in 2021 to over 60,200 in 2025). As almost all of our readers access articles through their institution or employer, this continued growth highlights that an institutional subscription to ACS Publications journals is still a fundamental need for researchers worldwide.
Publishing support for immediate green open access
Self-archiving, or green OA, is a fundamental part of open science. It provides a mechanism for authors to share the accepted manuscripts of their published works in repositories (services that provide centralized storage of research from an institution, country, or field).
This typically occurs after an embargo period following publication; embargo periods vary, but in many scientific fields the accepted duration is 12 months. However, some research funders (such as all US federal funders) and national governments have policies in place that require grantees to provide immediate green open access to their manuscripts at the time the article is published.
Introduced in mid-2024 and now covering over 200 institutions in five countries, ACS Publications read and green agreements are a relatively new development that waive the embargo period for published research. This ensures that researchers can self-archive in a repository as soon as the article is published in an ACS Publications hybrid journal.
OA publishing support for the final article
Some institutions and research funders prefer immediate OA for the version of record (the final version of the article as it appears when published in a journal). Read and publish agreements emerged as a response to this need.
ACS Publications has many different agreements with institutions all around the world, and while the specifics of agreements may vary slightly, they all provide support for immediate OA publication of the version of record in some, or all, of our journals.
Publishing the version of record as OA also enables immediate green self-archiving. ACS Publications submits all OA articles to PubMed Central and also participates in Jisc Publications Router and DeepGreen initiatives. Authors can also self-archive their manuscript in any repository they wish. Our leading OA workflow makes it simple for authors to opt in, and fast for institutional administrators to confirm OA funding and to track publishing uptake among their researchers. All our agreements are also supported by dedicated staff who assist with enquiries and resolve author queries.
Are you covered?
You can check our website at the link below to see if your institution participates in an ACS Publications institutional open access agreement:
If you're an author affiliated with a participating institution, opting into OA is easy. You just need to ensure your affiliation is set correctly in the ACS Publishing Center before submitting to a journal that's covered by your institution's agreement. (Using an institutional email address is also recommended to ensure swift approval by your institutional administrator.)
If your manuscript is accepted for publication after peer review, you'll automatically be prompted to publish OA under the terms of your institution's agreement.
If you don't see your institution among the thousands listed in the lookup tool, contact your librarian—discussions may already be underway to provide you with reading access and publishing support. We also have options for authors to publish OA using grant or personal funding. You can find out more on the Open Science site.