Domestic Academic Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How was my institution's tier determined?

A: For academic customers in the US, we grouped the new Carnegie classifications into five tiers, which are very similar to the previous iteration of Carnegie rankings.  Within each of these tiers, sub-tiers were developed to further refine placement, as Carnegie classifications don’t take chemistry in general, nor ACS journals in particular, into account.  In order to re-enforce one of our guiding principles, that similar schools pay similar amounts, we developed these sub-tiers by reviewing each institution’s usage of our journals, its enrollment, and the number of degrees granted in Chemistry. 

Q: My institution is part of a consortium.  Will we still have full-text article access to the same journals we did last year?

A: We want to continue all of our very strong relationships with consortia all over the world.  Your access will depend largely on your decisions, but we will certainly work with you and your consortium to ensure stability within the group and access to our journals.  We still have attractive incentives to offer consortia and their membership, which you should review with your consortium director and your ACS sales representative.

Q: Will my price increase if my usage increases -- will I move from sub- tier to another?

A: The ACS will review and occasionally (but not annually) adjust the sub-tiers to accurately reflect averages across the entire market segment.  Therefore, at the margins, it’s possible some sites will move to a different sub-tier (though this will also depend on enrollment as well – there are some sub-tiers wherein even higher usage won’t cause a change). So, a site is just as likely to move down a sub-tier as up – an example of the neutrality that’s been built-in to the model.

Q: Is the result of this model that no type of school (eg, large) or market segment (eg, US-based) subsidizes another (eg, small, or outside the US)?

A: Yes.  That’s one of the driving principles behind the move towards this new model:  that like schools pay like amounts.  Thus, the idea is to avoid any subsidization, whether across tiers or across borders.  Schools located outside the US are being compared more closely than ever before with domestic institutions, and will be charged accordingly.  Our goal is to have institutions of all kinds feel confident that they’re getting good, and relative, value from our journal content – relative to similar but not identical academic institutions, and relative to their usage and need for it.

Q: What if I don't want the whole package -- can I still select individual titles?  Will I still get a discount?

A: Absolutely:  that’s another key difference between this new model and our old one.  Now there will be discounts for different numbers of subscriptions – the schedule is located here.

Q: How will new journals be priced?

A: New journals will be priced at an introductory level.  As article output and usage change, and once an impact factor is assigned, the price will shift up or down accordingly – the journal will be weighted just like all our others.  This will affect the prices of other journals, as of course the total cannot exceed 100%.

Q: How are your individual journal prices calculated?

A: We’ve completely de-constructed our journal pricing to make it more web-oriented.  Instead of matching print prices dollar for dollar, we’ve broken each journal down by articles published, impact factor, and usage to create weighted or relative prices within the ACS corpus.  So, the journals outputting the most articles, with the highest impact factors, and generating the most downloads, will be the most expensive journal.  And so on down the line.

Q: What do you mean by "single-bill" groups or consortia?

A: Some consortia comprised of dozens if not hundreds of schools pay their annual invoice as a group – ACS sends one invoice to the consortium, and the consortium remits one payment to ACS.  This is in contrast to “multi-pay” consortia, in which many schools may have been more loosely confederated; each site pays its own invoice and thus, may have a slightly different title profile than others in the same group.