University professors will now be able to expand the scope of their research without paying access fees for academic materials thanks to a new agreement between the University and the American Chemical Society.
The transformative open access agreement provides University researchers with full access to ACS journals and offers financial support for up to 28 LSU-affiliated authors who choose to publish articles under an open license.
Transformative agreements are contracts that transform the traditional scholarly publishing model by shifting costs to article publishing charges and allowing for more open access reading.
The “Read and Publish” agreement has been tested in European countries like Hungary, but LSU is the first North American college to sign a transformative agreement with the ACS.
Dean of Libraries Stanley Wilder supported the agreement wholeheartedly and knew the University could make it come to fruition.
“It’s not surprising that this sort of groundbreaking agreement happens here,” Wilder said. “People look to us for this kind of thing.”
Before the agreement, LSU paid close to $5 million each year for the licensing of ACS journals, an amount Wilder called “burdensome and unsustainable.”
In addition to the cost to access ACS journals, LSU researchers seeking to publish their work open access incurred fees up to $4,000 per article.
Assistant Professor of Chemistry Noémie Elgrishi leads a research group studying water purification and energy storage. Previously, researchers like Elgrishi had to decide whether to not publish open access or to find the financial support to make their research available all over the world.
“The ACS publishes some of the most influential journals in Chemistry,” said Elgrishi in an LSU Libraries press release. “Most of them publish using a hybrid model in which papers are not open access except if the authors pay a fee, so most researchers could not publish open access in ACS journals. This new agreement is a game-changer.”
Wilder described the circumstances surrounding the agreement as “fortuitous.” Just as LSU’s contract was completed with the ACS, Tom Diamond read a press release about ACS’s transformative agreement with Hungary ADSF.
LSU Libraries’ Copyright and Scholarly Communications Policy Director Darceé Olson read the contracts Diamond brought her, and soon the ACS was on the phone negotiating the new agreement.
“There was the sound of jaws hitting the ground, like, ‘how did we in Baton Rouge know about this thing going on in Hungary?’” Olson said. “It just set the tone for a really great negotiation with them.”
Olson said the negotiations ran smoothly without much resistance on the part of the ACS.
“They’re really excited about this new way of publishing,” Olson said. “It’s something they are very proud to be doing and they were very excited about working with LSU.”
