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.