The American Chemical Society (ACS) has joined the Society Publishers’ Coalition (SocPC). SocPC is a group of like-minded, not-for-profit learned societies, community publishers, and charities who publish as part of their charitable objectives and who re-invest the surplus from their publishing into the disciplinary communities they serve. As the open access movement grows, SocPC members […]
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has joined the Society Publishers’ Coalition (SocPC). SocPC is a group of like-minded, not-for-profit learned societies, community publishers, and charities who publish as part of their charitable objectives and who re-invest the surplus from their publishing into the disciplinary communities they serve. As the open access movement grows, SocPC members seek to navigate the change in publishing models in a way that sustains their charitable activities, continuing to serve their research communities while promoting the widest dissemination of research articles.
As a scientific society and non-profit organization, we are proud to be a part of SocPC. ACS has a long history of philanthropic activity, as do all other societies engaged in SocPC.
The ACS Project SEED (Summer Experiences for the Economically Disadvantaged) Program is a paid summer internship for high school students. Through this program, students have the opportunity to work with scientists in real laboratories, learning about careers in chemistry and receiving mentoring in college preparation and career development. Project SEED has served over 11,000 students, many of whom have gone on to pursue chemistry as a career.
ACS also provides funding to researchers through a variety of philanthropic programs. The ACS Scholars Program awards over $1 million to over 300 students annually, in renewable scholarship funds to undergraduate students from historically underrepresented groups in the chemical sciences, majoring in chemistry-related disciplines, and intending to pursue chemistry-related careers. ACS also awards more than $20 million each year in research grants for researchers studying agriculture development, medicinal inorganic chemistry, research related to green chemistry, and many more topics. Grants are also provided to high school chemistry teachers so that they can enhance their classroom offerings and inspire an interest in chemistry in their students.
Beyond its direct funding of grants and scholarships, ACS directs its resources toward activities that enrich and enable the chemistry and publication enterprises. As a founding member of ChemRxiv, the premiere preprint server for chemistry, ACS pioneered one of chemistry’s fundamental open science resources. ACS works together with their sister societies to maintain and continually improve ChemRxiv, for the benefit of chemists everywhere.
Peer review is essential to the integrity of scholarly communication, and ACS offers considerable support for this crucial activity. ACS’ Peer Review Lab is a free training course for peer reviewers, providing instruction in all elements of the peer-review process. ACS also recently launched ACS Author Lab, which provides authors training in scholarly communication.
As the scholarly publishing field shifts toward open access, we look forward to collaborating with other SocPC members on innovative solutions to ensure that philanthropic activities like ACS’ continue.