American Chemical Society (ACS) Signs Innovative North American Open Access Agreement with MIT

From ACS:

 The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries today announced a new and innovative agreement, which will advance key elements of open access.

Through this agreement, all ACS journal articles with MIT-affiliated corresponding authors will be made open access. [Our emphasis] The associated accepted manuscripts will be automatically deposited into MIT’s open access repository, as called for under MIT’s Framework for Publisher Contracts, and in a manner consistent with ACS publishing policies. In addition, a number of the final published papers (the version of record) will also be made open on the ACS publishing platform at no additional cost to individual authors.

Together, these two complementary and sustainable pathways to open access advance the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy’s aim to “disseminate the fruits of [the faculty’s] research and scholarship as widely as possible.” The terms of the agreement add a new service of ACS-managed auto-deposit to the existing pathways ACS has developed to advance open access. This approach will support researchers at MIT in efficiently making their work openly accessible, as called for in the policy. The direct deposit automation is a value-added service unique to ACS’ agreement with MIT and aligns with a key element of MIT’s framework.

“This is a great example of an agreement that meets the needs of MIT scholars and advances the progress of science,” says Chris Bourg, Ph.D., director of MIT Libraries. “We are especially pleased that ACS has agreed to develop and implement an auto-deposit service for institutional repositories, which is a core principle of the MIT framework.”

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing