LATEST UPDATE
Another consultation with JISC and the HE sector is taking place prior to final negotiations with ACS on their proposed Read & Publish Agreement.
In the interim ACS is providing ‘grace access’ to read their journals until 30 April 2025.
The Library is taking part in these consultations on behalf of the University of Kent and will keep relevant colleagues updated as to how these progress.
Our Read and Publish agreement with the academic publisher American Chemical Society (ACS) ended in December 2024. Since this time JISC and ACS have been negotiating a new deal on behalf of UK HE Institutions, including Kent.
We are developing contingency plans in the event that an agreement cannot be reached.
ACS provided “grace access” for read access to their journals until 31st March 2025 whilst negotiations took place. As this period is now ending and an agreement is yet to be made, staff and students need to be aware of the following access arrangements to ACS content from the 1 April 2025.
Access to read journal articles:
We have complete access to ACS journal articles published up to 1 January 2025.
From 1 April 2025, articles published after this date will need to be made via our document delivery service.
Publishing in ACS journals:
From the 1 April 2025 you will not be able to publish with ACS and meet REF or UKRI requirements without the payment of an Article Processing Charge or Article Development Charge, or the use of a REF Open Access “exception”.
Please note there are no library funds available for payment of these charges.
Contact the library Open Research team on researchsupport@kent.ac.uk for further guidance on this and alternative journals to publish with.
You can also visit our Read And Publish Agreements page for a list of publishers where we have agreements in place and use our Kent Read and Publish Journal Search to identify journals that are covered.
We will continue to update this page as news is made available about this agreement along with our contingencies to provide access to ACS content.