Open Access in Chemistry
The acceptance and spread of open access are still less advanced in chemistry than in physics or biology, for example. The reasons for this are diverse and undoubtedly arise also from the traditional development of the chemistry community. Nevertheless, there has been an increase in open access activities in chemistry in recent years. For example, large specialist publishers have converted several journals to open access, and chemical societies have intensified their activities towards open access, as shown, for example, by the establishment of the preprint server ChemRxiv. One pioneer in this field is Peter Murray-Rust of the University of Cambridge, who has been active both in the area of open access and open data.
There are still reservations about open access publishing in chemistry – also because of fears regarding the free reuse of research results by industry and the related aspects of patent-protected results. However, these fears can be dispelled by granting suitable reuse licences. Although the German Chemical Society (GDCh) was critical of Plan S in a statement issued in 2018, its partner publisher Wiley-VCH signed a transformative agreement with DEAL in 2019 (Schmitz, 2019). Moreover, a DEAL agreement with Springer Nature has been in force since 2020, and in 2024, a DEAL agreement was concluded with Elsevier.
Open Access Journals
As of October 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 636 indexed journals under the keyword chemistry.
The most important open access journals in chemistry include:
- ARKIVOC
- Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry
- Journal of Cheminformatics (BMC)
- Chemical Science (RSC)
- ChemistryOpen (Wiley-VCH)
- ACS Central Science
- Communications Chemistry
Although this list is just a small selection of chemistry journals with open access models, it includes journals from relevant publishers or with a long open access tradition. In addition to their traditional, subscription-based journals or their hybrid journals, some large and eminently relevant and renowned publishers – for example the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and Nature Publishing – also offer open access journals in chemistry. Furthermore, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is planning to convert its entire journal portfolio (44 journals as of 2024) to open access by 2028 (see https://www.rsc.org/news-events/articles/2022/oct/rsc-oa-commitment/).
Although the Journal Impact Factor as a quality metric is very controversial (see the Declaration on Research Assessment, DORA), it should be noted that many of the aforementioned open access journals have sizeable Impact Factors. For example, according to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), as of 2023, the Impact Factor of the RSC journal Chemical Science was 7.6, and the Impact Factor of the ACS journal ACS Central Science was 12.7.
One journal that has been open access since the beginning of the open access movement is ARKIVOC (established in the year 2000). It covers organic chemistry, including areas of bio-organic and organometallic chemistry. The journal is published by ARKAT USA, Inc., a not-for-profit organisation established through charitable donation in the year 2000, whose aim is to promote the dissemination of organic chemical research worldwide, hence benefitting students, researchers, and commercial and non-commercial enterprises. Thus, neither the submission of an article to ARKIVOC nor its publication is subject to author-side fees. This is also true of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (BJOC), which has been published in open access since 2005 and is fully funded by the Beilstein-Institut. Thus, both journals fall under the label “platinum” or “diamond open access”. In addition to being reusable completely free of charge, the articles are published under a CC BY licence, thereby enabling their greatest possible reuse.
The Journal of Cheminformatics was established in 2009 as an open access journal at BioMed Central (BMC), which is now part of Springer Nature. It covers all areas of cheminformatics and molecular modelling. The citation rate has more than doubled in the past five years, increasing from 3,490 citations in 2019 to 9,430 citations in 2023. The journal ChemistryOpen has been published since 2012 by Wiley-VCH on behalf of ChemistryEurope, an association of 16 European chemical societies. Until 2020, ChemistryEurope was known as ChemPubSoc Europe.
Video about the Funding of Open Access Articles
Open Access Books
As of October 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed 1,960 titles under the keyword chemistry, and the OAPEN Library listed some 972 titles under the search term chemistry in the subject area science.
The most important publishers of chemistry include Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and De Gruyter, all of whom have published only a small number of open access books in chemistry to date.
Disciplinary Repositories
The most important disciplinary repositories in chemistry include:
- Beilstein Archives: contains preprints from the fields of organic chemistry and nanotechnology that are intended for publication in one of the Beilstein journals. The service is operated and funded by the Beilstein-Institut.
- ChemRxiv: a server for preprints in chemistry and related areas. ChemRxiv is collaboratively managed and funded by the five largest chemical societies in the world: the ACS, the Chinese Chemical Society, the Chemical Society of Japan, the GDCh, and the RSC.
- PubMed Central: contains full texts of biomedical and life sciences journal literature (incl. biochemistry, medical chemistry). It is the full-text archive of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). The archive was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NLM.
Institutional repositories of relevance for chemistry include, for example, JuSER, the publication portal of Forschungszentrum Jülich; the publications database of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht; the publications repository of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf; and Renate, the German National Library of Science and Technology’s (TIB) repository for science and technology.
An overview of relevant repositories is provided by the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).
Video about Self-Archiving Rights
Practical Tip
Finding Open Access Literature (in German)
Other Offerings
Chemistry is shaped by laboratory work. The experiments conducted are documented in so-called lab notebooks, or lab books. These records are still often kept in paper form. However, as digitalisation advances, the possibilities of digital documentation are also increasing.
Chemotion is an electronic lab notebook (ELN) for chemistry, in which molecules and reactions can be systematically recorded in digital form (Tremouilhac et al., 2017). In addition, the content and data can be made freely available for reuse under a Creative Commons licence via the affiliated Chemotion repository. The development of the Chemotion open source software was funded by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
For an overview of various electronic lab notebooks, see the ELN-Wegweiser (ELN guide) published by ZB MED (Adam & Lindstädt, 2020).
Open Science in Chemistry
Although the topic of open science and its sub-topic open access to research data are still addressed less in chemistry than in other disciplines, there are small rays of hope, for example in the area of crystallography. The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) and the Crystallography Open Database (COD) provide an access to crystallographic data that is already well established in that community.
There are already a number of open access databases in the area of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy (e.g. the Spectral Database for Organic Compounds) that can be used to search for and to compare spectroscopic data. However, this is mostly limited more to the depiction of spectra than to the actually recorded data points
Chemical data and information can be deposited and made freely available in the PubChem database at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubChem collects information on, for example, chemical structures, identifiers, chemical and physical properties, and biological activities.
Within the framework of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NDFI), the topic of open science and the handling of research data at national level is being addressed in the chemistry consortium NFDI4Chem (Steinbeck et al., 2020). The aim is to advance the digitalisation of all relevant steps in chemical research in order to support researchers in collecting, storing, processing, analysing, disclosing, and reusing research data. Within the framework of NFDI4Chem, discipline-specific repositories for research data are also being developed further. They include, for example, the repository Chemotion for diverse analysis data; the NMR spectroscopy data repository nmrXiv; and RADAR4Chem, a generic repository for all types of chemical research data.
The Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data) provides a good overview of further research data repositories for chemistry.
References
- Adam, B., & Lindstädt, B. (2021). Electronic laboratory notebooks in the context of research data management and good research practice – A guide for the life sciences. ZB MED – Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences. https://www.publisso.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PUBLISSO/PUBLISSO_ELN-Guide_2021-04-07_view_englisch.pdf
- Schmitz, K. (2019). DEAL-Vereinbarung tritt heute in Kraft. https://www.gdch.de/service-information/nachricht/article/deal-vereinbarung-tritt-heute-in-kraft.html
- Steinbeck, C., Koepler, O., Bach, F., Herres-Pawlis, S., Jung, N., Liermann, J., Neumann, S., Razum, M., Baldauf, C., Biedermann, F., Bocklitz, T., Boehm, F., Broda, F., Czodrowski, P., Engel, T., Hicks, M., Kast, S., Kettner, C., Koch, W., … Wulle, S. (2020). NFDI4Chem – Towards a national research data infrastructure for chemistry in Germany. Research Ideas and Outcomes, 6, Article e55852. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.6.e55852
- Tremouilhac, P., Nguyen, A., Huang, Y.-C., Kotov, S., Lütjohann, D. S., Hübsch, F., Jung, N., & Bräse, S. (2017). Chemotion ELN: An Open Source electronic lab notebook for chemists in academia. Journal of Cheminformatics, 9(1), Article 54. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13321-017-0240-0
Further Reading
- Brazil, R. (2024, September 2). Will open science change chemistry? Chemistry World. https://www.chemistryworld.com/careers/will-open-science-change-chemistry/4020023.article
- Jensen, J. (2021, January 8). Open access chemistry publishing options in 2021. Proteins and Wave Functions. https://proteinsandwavefunctions.blogspot.com/2021/01/open-access-chemistry-publishing.html
Content editor of this web page: Dr. Janna Neumann, TIB (last updated: October 2024)