2007 Pricing Letter
August 2006
Dear ACS Library Customer:
Thank you for subscribing to the American Chemical Society’s publications
in 2006. Over the course of the past year we’ve spoken with many of you
about a variety of issues that affect those librarians, scientific publishers,
and scholarly societies who join in serving the diverse information needs of
scholars and professionals. I am writing to you at this time to communicate
how the ACS is addressing some of those important issues, and to update you
on our continued focus on standards of excellence for our publishing program,
which continues to broaden in both reach and impact.
More Content, Expanded Usage, Sustained Quality
We project that during 2006, ACS journals will publish more than 30,000 original
articles — in keeping with the growth of high quality submissions across
our journals program. In 2006, we anticipate the number of articles downloaded
from ACS Web Editions by licensed users at institutions located in
more than 80 countries will surpass 55 million in total. That remarkable growth
in usage, coupled with increased editorial selectivity by the many leading scientists
who lend their expertise as ACS journal editors, has continued to distinguish
ACS journals from other journals in the chemical and related sciences. This
distinction is also evident from the recently released 2005
ISI® Journal
Citation Reports. The peer-reviewed journals of the ACS rank #1 in citations
or ISI® Impact Factor in each of the seven core chemistry categories (Analytical
Chemistry, Applied Chemistry, Inorganic & Nuclear Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry,
Multidisciplinary Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Physical Chemistry), as
well as in seven additional chemistry-related categories ranging from agriculture
to polymer science (including the new ISI® category of Nanoscience & Nanotechnology,
where the Society’s journal, Nano Letters, is number one in ISI® Impact
Factor). ACS journals exceeded 1.1 million total citations in 2005, an annual
increase of 13%. The 27 ACS journals included among the 440 titles covered by
ISI across the seven core chemistry categories accounted for more than one-third
of the total citations in those same categories. With a collection of more than
600,000 research articles spanning over 125 years of science, we remain committed
to providing this level of excellence as an information provider to chemistry
professionals and our customers worldwide.
For more information about data from the 2005
ISI® Journal Citation Report as related to ACS journals, please see our Most-Cited
Journals web page.
2007 Subscription Prices
I am pleased to inform you that the rate of increase in the list price for
our journals will be lower in 2007 than we have announced in recent years. The
list prices for 31 out of the 33 journals in our collection will each increase
by 5% in 2007. That pricing adjustment will enable us to continue to support
the growth in scientific research internationally that is reflected in the editorial
growth of high-quality, high-impact content — expansion that we project
will continue at the rate of 10% or more, as is the case for most of our well-established
journals.
The continued excellence of our program is made possible with your support
and the participation of our expert scientists as editors. As our journals
continue to receive significantly more submissions for consideration each year,
we have expanded our journal offices internationally and are investing in web-based
peer review systems to enable us to ensure a high level of selectivity and efficient
publication. This year, we began the process of launching the ACS Paragon
Plus Environment as an industry-leading web environment for our authors
and journal editors. These ongoing efforts reflect our commitment to our editors,
authors, reviewers, customers and readers, who have come to rely upon the ACS
for authoritative information spanning a wide range of established and new areas
of research and inquiry.
New Title Launches
I would like to take this opportunity also to express our appreciation for
your support of new ACS journals launched in recent years. Our most recent
addition to the scholarly literature, ACS
Chemical Biology, is doing
remarkably well in its first year of publication. As an indication of our
willingness to work cooperatively with you, and to thank you for your consideration
and early adoption of that title, ACS
Chemical Biology will not increase
in price in 2007.
The Journal
of Physical Chemistry is one of our titles that continues
to grow in a remarkable fashion in response to author demand. That journal,
which currently publishes Parts A and B in two volumes of 51 issues each, will
expand in 2007 to publish a third thematic Part C as a result of rapid growth
in evolving areas of physical chemistry. The new Part C, effectively a
new journal in itself, will publish 51 issues from the outset, bringing to 153
the total number of issues delivered annually for an institutional subscription
to The Journal
of Physical Chemistry. The new combined institutional
subscription price (encompassing all three Parts A-C) of the journal will be
$5,850 ($7,071 for subscribers outside North America). This editorial expansion
of The Journal of Physical Chemistry beginning in 2007 will
be in keeping with its commitment to provide the scientific community with high-value
information in a cost-effective manner. Given the journal’s 2006 current
list price of $4,274 (for Parts A and B together) and its anticipated 2006 publishing
output of 5,500 articles and 44,000 pages (an average of $0.78 per article — currently
at $0.10 per page), the value delivered by The
Journal of Physical Chemistry stands
in contrast to higher-priced alternatives. (For more information, please see
our press release and chart
of the comparative value of The Journal
of Physical Chemistry A&B and related titles).
We are pleased to announce that in mid-year 2007, ACS will introduce a new
journal, tentatively titled NanoScience and NanoTechnology, that will
publish full-length articles, reviews, and editorial features in the rapidly-growing
area of interdisciplinary nano-scale research and its many novel applications
that are emerging worldwide. This new title will complement the Society’s
preeminent journal, Nano Letters, and will be offered to all our ACS
Web Editions institutional subscribers free of charge during 2007.
Introducing: ACS AuthorChoice
It is also my pleasure to inform you of an important new policy that we will
be establishing in support of our authors—and the scientific community
at large. We are establishing, for launch later this year, a new policy
to be entitled “ACS AuthorChoice.” This
policy will give individual authors (or their funding agency sponsors) the option
to pay a fee that will sponsor the open availability of their final, published
articles online without charge to readers — at the time of publication.
The base fee for the ACS Author Choice option will be $3,000 — with
significant discounts for contributing authors who are members of the American
Chemical Society or are affiliated with an ACS subscribing institution.
The ACS AuthorChoice option will
be offered to authors only after acceptance of their article for publication,
so as to ensure separation between editorial decision-making and economic considerations. Under
the ACS Author Choice option, the article will be
made freely available immediately upon publication to the Web.
The ACS AuthorChoice option will
complement our current ACS Articles on Request policy, whereby we now
provide (without charge) all ACS corresponding authors with a unique URL that
they may share via e-mail or post as an author-directed link from their web
site(s). You will recall that ACS Articles on Request now enables access
for up to 50 free e-prints of an author’s final published article to be
provided to interested colleagues within the first year following publication — and
unlimited access via the same author-directed link thereafter. At a paying
author’s choosing, the ACS AuthorChoice option
will sponsor immediate open access to an article as
soon as it is published on the ACS web site. (For more information,
please see our press release.)
Archiving and Preservation Initiatives
In the spring of 2006, ACS joined the CLOCKSS pilot project, described at www.lockss.org/clockss/Home.
The pilot project, a two-year program comprised of 12 publishers, 7 libraries,
and OCLC, is “a community-based initiative to build a trusted dark archive
to protect online scholarly content from catastrophic events and other long-term
interruptions”. By participating in CLOCKSS, the ACS will aid in determining
if a distributed model of sharing and preserving electronic data will prove
a sustainable and responsible means of ensuring long-term availability of scholarly
material.
Beyond our involvement in CLOCKSS, the ACS is exploring participation in
other initiatives related to the archiving and preservation of digital content.
We look forward to helping with the development of solutions that serve the
needs and interests of our institutional customers, and to ensuring that the
scholars of tomorrow can avail themselves of the scholarly research canon.
A Commitment to Customer Service
As this letter is being written we are in the final stages of converting
our subscription management information to deploy a new state-of-the-art software
system for the management of our customer relations in a web environment. We’ll
be working closely with you and our subscription agents to ensure that your
subscription orders for 2007 are handled correctly and efficiently. In the coming
weeks, we will notify you about your new account numbers, which you’ll
need in order to access your ACS Web Edition usage statistics (available via
our Librarian Resource Center).
In addition we will continue to keep you apprised of the latest ACS Publications
news via our monthly newsletter LiveWire.
Once again, thank you for all your feedback and support of ACS journals.
In 2007, we will continue our long standing tradition of providing you and your
patrons with the high-quality, high-impact, and high-value publications of the
American Chemical Society in the chemical and related sciences.
Best wishes,
Dean Smith
Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Institutional Rates & Policies
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