In 2008 Springer acquired BioMed Central Group, an OA publisher founded
in Great Britain in 2000 publishing at the time of the acquisition some
180 journals including 7 chemistry journals [17]. Wiley started to
publish ChemistryOpen in 2012 in partnership with the ChemPubSoc
Europe, a consortium of 16 continental European chemical societies
[5].
In 2015 the Royal Society of Chemistry converted its journalChemical Science to an OA journal and waived the APC. The
subsequent year, the same publisher converted RSC Advances (the
world’s largest chemistry subscription journal with 13,287 published
articles published in 2016) to open access setting the APC at £500 for
all authors for the first two years (2017 and 2018), and then at £750.
Due to introduction of the APC, the publisher expected the journal to
publish “in the region of 7,000 articles in 2017” [18], remaining
the largest chemical science journal. Indeed, in 2017 the journal
published 6,675 articles, followed by 4,767 paper in 2018 and 4,801 in
2019 [19].
Chemistry scholars willing to publish their studies in open access can
opt also for publication in multidisciplinary OA journals, many of which
are owned by well-established publishers. Examples includeScientific Reports and Nature Communications (Springer), Science Advances (American Association for the
Advancement of Science), Advanced Science (Wiley), and Heliyon (Elsevier). Owned by a nonprofit publisher, PLOS
One is another cross-disciplinary OA journal publishing also chemistry
studies.
Finally, most publishers of chemistry journals allow to make individual
articles open access upon payment of an APC. The resulting journals
allowing this option are called “hybrid” journals to distinguish them
from fully open access journals. “Gold” and “platinum” open access
journals indicate, respectively, journals for which the publisher levies
or does not levy an APC. Originally, the color codes to classify
journals included “gold” providing immediate OA to research articles,
and “green” allowing authors to deposit their peer-reviewed
manuscripts in OA repositories after an embargo period [20].
Table 4 . APC values in different currencies for selected
chemistry and multidisciplinary journals as of late 2020.