Scholarly Communications

This Transformative Agreement provides a pathway for Open Access (OA) publishing in American Chemical Society (ACS) journals by authors associated with The Claremont Colleges (TCC).

TCC participates in this Agreement as part of our Library Consortium SCELC.

The list of eligible journals includes all 78 subscription-based and fully open access ACS Journals.

Type of publication licenses available: Closed (for hybrid journals only), Open CC-BY (least restrictive), and Open CC-BY-NC-ND (most restrictive).

Eligibility:

• The corresponding author needs to be affiliated with one of The Claremont Colleges or TCCS - including faculty, researchers, adjunct faculty, lecturers, librarians, staff, graduate, or undergraduate students. 
• The e-mail address used by the corresponding author must be associated with the institution’s organizational domain.
• Eligible article types vary by journal and eligibility is determined by journal editorial staff.

Authors with research grants are asked to contribute a discounted Article Processing Charge (APC) of $3,000. APCs are covered entirely for authors without research grants.

Submission workflow:

Articles accepted after July 1, 2022 are eligible for both the discounted APC of $3,000 and the option for full funding of the APC from the collective subscription pool. If you are an eligible corresponding author and you select the open access option in ACS’s Journal Publishing Agreement system after your article has been accepted, you will be asked whether or not you have research funds to pay for open access publishing. After selecting either option (“yes” or “no”) you will receive an invitation to log into the payment processing system used by ACS, CCC RightsLink, to complete the process.

(It is necessary to set up an account in RightsLink first; if you do not have an account, you will be prompted to create one.) 

Then click through the following steps in the RightsLink system, including: 

Indicate whether you have research funds available to pay the author’s portion of the article processing charge. 

• If you have the research funds to pay the $3,000 APC, select “Bill me” in CCC RightsLink and proceed to enter the billing details.
• If you do NOT have research funds to pay the $3,000 APC, select “Seek funding” in CCC RightsLink to have your request routed to the library's subscription pool. You do not need to contact your campus’ library to make the funding request. Your request will be processed  within one business day and if approved, your charge will be paid in full by the library.
• You will then also be asked to identify the reason that full funding is needed, choosing from a menu of options (e.g., the research is not grant-funded and you have no other sources of funding available; the grant budget did not include money for publishing; etc.)

While we recommend the OA option, and you can rest assured that there will be no additional charge to your Library, where and how you publish is your decision. The agreement with ACS does not mandate open access publishing, nor does it dictate your journal selection. Rather, it makes the open access publishing option for ACS journals more affordable. You can opt out of OA publishing if you choose.

Acceptance dates: July 1, 2022 - December 31, 2025