More Open Access Publishing Opportunities with ACM and RSC

Starting in January 2024, Duke authors will have even more opportunities to publish open access without paying a fee. Duke University Libraries is pleased to announce that we have entered publication agreements with the Association for Computing Machinery and the Royal Society of Chemistry. These augment existing agreements with PLOS, Cambridge University Press, and others. The Libraries’ seek to increase the reach of Duke scholarship and to lower barriers for Duke authors to make their work freely available, and publication agreements are one tactic in pursuit of this goal.

While the Association for Computing Machinery has offered some author fee (APC)-based open access publishing options for the last decade, they have recently embarked on a more accelerated transition to become a completely open access publisher by 2026, which we fully support. Under their ACM OPEN model, publications with Duke corresponding authors will be published openly without any cost to the authors, supported by Duke University Libraries sponsorship. This applies to ACM journals, conference proceedings, and magazines, and eligible authors are identified by their institutional email address. Authors affiliated with Duke professional schools and with Duke Kunshan University are included.

The Royal Society of Chemistry intends to continue to be a hybrid publisher in the near future, publishing both paywalled and open access content. Through this new arrangement with Duke University Libraries, Duke researchers will continue to have subscription access to read RSC publications, as well as now being able to publish open access with RSC without having to pay article charges. The publication benefit applies to Duke corresponding authors publishing in “hybrid” RSC journals (all RSC journals except for their “gold” OA journals). As with ACM, authors will be identified by institutional email address and the program is inclusive of the professional schools and DKU.

Duke University Libraries have for many years been strong supporters of making high quality research available to broader audiences, helping to put knowledge in the service of society. While there are benefits to these kinds of publication agreements, they may also perpetuate inequities in the scholarly publishing system. As the Libraries have expressed in the past, we do not want to rely on the APC (article processing charge) model long-term and are committed to continuing to work with peer institutions, funding agencies, scholarly societies, and publishers to develop alternative models that present fewer cost barriers to readers and authors.

Regardless of where they publish, Duke authors can also make their individual articles openly available at no cost via the library’s DukeSpace open access repository and their Scholars@Duke profile, through the open access policy adopted by Duke’s Academic Council in 2010. More information about how to make your publications available this way can be found here: https://guides.library.duke.edu/dukespace

If you have any questions or encounter any problems using these publisher programs, please reach out at open-access@duke.edu.