En route to fully-OA publishing: Beth Craanen shares insights from the ECS Free the Science Initiative

When the Electrochemical Society launched ECS Plus in 2016, a subscription package that gives institutions access to all ECS journal content, as well as unlimited credits for their authors to publish Open Access (OA) articles with ECS, the term “transformative agreement” was not yet commonplace. The ECS team just knew they wanted to transition all of their journals to fully-OA publishing models, and they were working to develop new funding options to reach that goal sustainably. ECS has been experimenting with Green and Gold OA since early 2014, when the society conceptualized “Free the Science,” a working initiative to increase ECS’ OA publishing outputs and eventually flip ECS journals to fully-OA models. ECS started the programmatic aspect of Free the Science with an Article Processing Charge (APC) OA publishing model and then began introducing institutional agreements. Fast forward to the present day and, in many ways, it’s as though ECS was forecasting the future publishing landscape and preparing for OA initiatives like Plan S long before their launch.