Being accepted for publication in your preferred journal is a major milestone for any author. But publication involves much more than simply posting a manuscript online: by publishing in an ACS Publications journal, you’ll benefit from a range of publishing services that help make your research accessible, discoverable, trustworthy, and preserved for the long term.
This article is the second in a series on the work that happens behind the scenes at ACS Publications.
Read part one: from submission to acceptance →
From Accepted Manuscript to Published Article
We know that the prime concern for many authors is getting their research into the hands of readers as quickly as possible. We’ve already detailed the editorial processes your manuscript goes through prior to acceptance. After acceptance, our production team transforms your manuscript into the final published format.
This work includes:
- Copyediting your manuscript, ensuring it fits the style of your chosen journal and communicates your work clearly.
- Typesetting and formatting the manuscript for the best reading experience, whether readers are accessing it directly through the ACS Publications website or via a downloaded PDF.
- Time for the corresponding author to check proofs and provide any final corrections immediately prior to publication.
- Application of scholarly markup schemas and metadata tagging to assist in human and machine-based discovery.
At the conclusion of this process, your final manuscript can be discovered, read, and cited by millions of readers in a user-friendly format.
Reaching the Widest Audience
Even excellent research can struggle to make an impact if your readers don't know it exists. Publishing in an ACS journal ensures your research can be discovered, read, and cited by a world of interested readers through the search tools they use every day.
In addition to online publication, articles receive a mix of promotional efforts from ACS Publications’ global marketing team:
- Automatic inclusion in data feeds to major literature databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and several others.
- Inclusion in regular ASAP alerts and issue electronic table of contents alerts.
- The possibility of being selected as an ACS Editors’ Choice article.
- Social media campaigns across multiple channels.
- Particularly newsworthy topics may be selected for a press release through ACS’ Science News Releases.
- Individual articles, or themed collections, are also occasionally highlighted here on ACS Axial.
These activities can lead to even more readers discovering your work, greater awareness among peers, and increased opportunities for engagement and impact.
Aiding Compliance with Funder Mandates
Open access is a core part of research dissemination for authors around the world. Depending on who funds your research, you might be required to either publish the version of record in an OA journal or make your accepted manuscript available in a repository.
If you’ve chosen to make the published version of the article open access, either by publishing through a read and publish agreement or by paying an article publishing charge with grant or personal funds, we’ll automatically submit a copy to PubMed Central. The contents of PMC are also mirrored on PMC Europe. Authors are free to immediately upload a copy of any OA article to other repositories as soon as the article is published.
Maintaining Research Integrity
A robust integrity process helps maintain trust in the published literature, protecting the credibility of both journals and researchers. While most potential problems are discovered before an article is accepted for publication, the work that our publishing integrity and editorial teams do to support you and your fellow authors continues beyond the point articles enter the literature. We continue to monitor and respond to concerns that may arise for a very small proportion of articles, including:
- Issuing corrections when errors in published papers are identified.
- Conducting integrity evaluations.
- Issuing expressions of concern if required.
- On relatively rare occasions, retracting published articles if conclusions are not supported by updated data, or if serious publishing integrity breaches are confirmed to have occurred.
Ensuring Long Term Visibility
When you publish your work, you want it to become a trusted part of the literature for future scientists to learn from and build upon. ACS Publications invests in preservation programs to ensure your work remains findable and available in perpetuity, going beyond just the article itself: any visual abstracts, supplementary data, or other relevant materials hosted on our journal platform are designed to be preserved for future generations of researchers. These efforts help protect content from technological changes, system failures, and data loss.
Maintaining scholarly content requires substantial ongoing investment by ACS Publications in areas such as:
- Digital storage.
- Platform maintenance, including development and integration of new technologies.
- Access control and platform security to prevent malicious access to systems.
- Implementing new features such as tagging of related articles, article recommendations, and support for ORCiD IDs.
- Feeding metadata to external systems which ensure readers can find your research no matter where they start.
From Acceptance to Publication and Beyond
Acceptance in your journal of choice is a significant achievement, but it's only one step in bringing your research to the world. After acceptance, ACS Publications works to:
- Publish your article quickly.
- Increase your work’s visibility.
- Support compliance requirements.
- Maintain the integrity of the scholarly record.
- Preserve your work and supporting materials for the future.
These activities help ensure that the research you've worked so hard to produce can be found, trusted, accessed, and built upon long after it’s published.
Ready to publish your next article with ACS Publications?