ACS Open Choice allows full re-use

Robert Kiley (Wellcome) has – in very timely fashion – answered the discussion about ACS and the NIH policy:

ACS Open Choice articles – now in PMC and UKPMC

Papers published by the American Chemical Society (ACS) under their Open Choice option are now available in PMC and UKPMC. Currently around 110 papers – drawn from 20 ACS journal titles – are now freely available. These papers can be found by running the following search on UKPMC:
ACS Author Choice [filter]
All future papers published under this model will be made available through these repositories at the time of publication.
ACS Open Choice articles are fully open access in the sense that the licence [PDF link] allows users – for non-commercial research and education purposes – to “access, download, copy, display and redistribute articles as well as adapt, translate text and data mine the content….”
This model meets the requirements of the Wellcome Trust – and the other funders in the UKPMC Funders Group.

The important thing – and I believe it’s new – is that this policy allows full re-use (for non-commercial use) of the material. Although I have some reservations about NC use I welcome the policy as stated by Robert. That means that the ACS is prepared to publish Open Access material if the author/funder pays – which is all that everyone has been asking for.

I am not surprised that Rich finds it confusing. There has been so much misinformation and disinformation that you need to be a Robert Kiley or Peter Suber to know the precise position. But here we are at a situation where everyone seems to have what they want.

  • The ACS gets paid to publish high quality papers.
  • Wellcome (or NIH) pays to get its research disseminated to everyone
  • The whole world can read the research – and thereby up the citation count.
  • The ACS gets paid by subscribers

If alien landed from a foreign planet, I couldn’t explain to them what all the fuss is about… Why should the ACS lobby to terminate a process in which it already participates?

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