Understanding Open Access - The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (ACS Publications)

"This issue of JPC Letters includes five Viewpoint articles that provide different perspectives on the Open Access (OA) movement, with four articles concerned with OA publications and one with OA to software and data. The ideas and thoughts presented in these Viewpoints (Table 1) highlight the complexities of the issue, which is often poorly understood by authors and readers; therefore, I hope that by covering this from different perspectives, our readers will better appreciate the issues ... One Viewpoint is from Darla Henderson, the Assistant Director of OA Programs at the Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS). She describes a number of programs that have been instituted at ACS to provide new and expanded OA options to authors ... The second Viewpoint is from Thurston Miller at the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame. This article provides detailed information about the effect of green and gold OA (green is where the author doesn’t pay, gold is where the author does pay) from the library perspective and how this translates into costs for the authors and for the libraries ... The third Viewpoint is from Franz Geiger, who is one of my colleagues at Northwestern University and who recently joined as Senior Editor of JPC A/B/C. Geiger’s article is written from the perspective of an author and taxpayer who is annoyed when there is no access to papers in which the taxpayers paid for the research. He describes ways for anyone to gain access to papers, and then, he considers the options for gold OA that are available to authors of papers in ACS journals and for green and gold OA at other journals ... The fourth Viewpoint is from Dan Gezelter, a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame. This article addresses the related issue of OA for software and data. Many aspects of this discussion are distinct from OA for publications, but there are also similarities ... The fifth article, by Prashant Kamat, the Deputy Editor of JPC Letters and faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, raises the issue of the consequences of the OA movement to authors and institutions ..."