University of California, Los Angeles: Researchers gain read-and-publish access to American Chemical Society journals in UC agreement

Through a University of California agreement with the American Chemical Society, UCLA and UC-affiliated corresponding authors will receive support for open access publication in ACS’ portfolio of more than 75 premier chemistry journals and gain full reading access to all ACS publications.


ACS is the fourth largest publisher of scholarly journal articles by UC researchers. The contract also extends to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the California State University system and 26 private universities that are members of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium.

Under the three-year agreement, all UCLA authors who choose to publish open access in an ACS journal can do so by paying a discounted article processing charge of $3,000 per article. Authors who do not have research funds available to pay the processing charge may request funding from UCLA Library. The library will cover processing charges for authors who choose to publish open access, ensuring that a lack of research funds does not present a barrier to publication.

The agreement takes effect today and will apply to articles accepted for publication between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2025. The workflow process will be in place July 1, 2022. For articles accepted between January 1 and July 1, 2022, ACS will contact authors to ask if they wish to retroactively make their papers open access.

The arrangement also grants UCLA students free access to read all ACS publications.

The agreement is ACS’ first read-and-publish agreement with a consortium of universities in the U.S., and the first such partnership among the UC, CSU system libraries and members of the statewide library consortium.