Tuesday, April 5, 2016

ACS Omega was too expensive

2018.01.23 update: I just noticed that the APC has been lowered to \$750 + 1 year ACS membership for corresponding author.  This is actually a reasonably good deal, so I am changing title.

Disclaimer: I applied to be a co-editor of this journal and was not selected.

ACS Omega has just announced its APCs: \$1500 (\$2000) under the ACS Authors Choice (CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND) license for members and an additional \$500 for non-members (since full membership costs $162, this is the real additional cost for one yearly publication).

The ACS Authors Choice license is not open access: under the ACS Authors Choice license you assign copyright to the ACS.  While
For non-commercial research and education purposes only, users may access, download, copy, display and redistribute articles as well as adapt, translate, text and data mine content contained in articles, ... 
you still can't, for example, use a figure from such an article in a book chapter without the ACS permission.  Also, the ACS can, for example, sell your article or your figures.

So the cost for to publish OA is ACS Omega is $2000.  That's more expensive than other impact neutral OA journals: PLoS One (\$1495), Scientific Reports (\$1495), F1000Research (\$1000), Rio Journal (\$850), PeerJ (\$100/author, Bio-only), and Royal Society Open Science ($0, for now).

Since all journals are impact neutral and provide quick review (AFAIK) price is the main considerations and I see no reason to pay more for to publish in ACS Omega.




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