We are pleased to announce that the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries has successfully concluded negotiations with ACS and entered into a three-year Read & Publish agreement. Under its terms, corresponding authors affiliated with Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL now have the opportunity to publish their research OA at no cost, provided certain conditions are met.
The agreement includes an annual quota for accepted research articles, which will increase incrementally over its course. For the year 2023, we anticipate that the quota will be reached by June. Furthermore, this agreement does not apply to articles that acknowledge funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. For more details, please visit our dedicated OA agreements webpage.
Researchers at the 4 Research Institutes rely on ACS as an important publisher and this agreement allows them to publish some of their research OA. However, the given limitations are rather disappointing. The low annual quota and the exclusion of articles from SNSF-funded research are a far cry from the outcome we had hoped for, but it is the best the community of Swiss University Libraries could achieve after years of negotiations with ACS.
Looking forward to the next negotiations, Lib4RI will continue to advocate for transformative agreements with the least possible restrictions.
