Open Access ACS

The American Chemical Society, the largest professional scientific society in the world with 158,000 members, announced today that it will be expanding access to articles in all of its 33 journals. One year after publication, ACS will post manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, a free digital archive. This is in response to this new policy from the NIH:

Beginning May 2, 2005, NIH-funded investigators are requested to submit to the NIH National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) an electronic version of the author's final manuscript upon acceptance for publication, resulting from research supported, in whole or in part, with direct costs from NIH.

ACS Journals are not the first publicly available scientific journals, but this addition is significant due to their prestige in the chemical community. ACS Publications Division President Robert Bovenschulte, had this to say:

These experimental policies balance the important goal of expanding dissemination of research with the need to preserve the integrity of the scientific record as well as the viability of our journals program.

Let's hope these experiments work. Now go read some chemistry.