Penn State University Libraries will enter into new open-access publishing agreements with two major scientific publishers starting in 2026. These contracts ensure that Penn State peer-reviewed research published through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) will be free of charge for the authors and all readers in support of Penn State's goal and policy enacted in January 2020 to make its "scholarly research available to the commonwealth and around the world."
"With increasing open-access requirements by federal funding agencies, it is more important than ever to ensure Penn State scientific papers are freely available to the public," said John Meier, head of STEM libraries at Penn State University Park. "Following our agreements with other STEM publishers like Springer Nature, the University Libraries continues to negotiate contracts with scholarly publishers to remove financial barriers for Penn State researchers and, by extension, the global research community."
ACM is moving to a completely open-access publishing model starting in 2026. Penn State is entering into a "read and publish" agreement that will ensure there are no author publishing charges for Penn State authors. ACM publications include more than 75 journals, seven magazines and proceedings from among 170 conferences. Penn State is a major contributor to ACM publications with nearly 100 articles published by University researchers annually in recent years.
ACS and the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI), in which Penn State is an active member, have reached a renewable three-year agreement to eliminate author publishing charges for Penn State researchers. ACS publishes more than 90 journals, including two new titles being added in 2026. Penn State researchers publish more than 100 peer-reviewed articles published annually in ACS publications.
These publishers accept research from a wide range of fields of study, from statistics to medicine.
Both agreements enable Penn State to align with the University's open-access policy and open-access mandates required by federal funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation. While some open-access agreements are capped, limiting the number of applicable articles per year, both of these agreements are unlimited. Penn State students and researchers also will have access to all ACS and ACM journals.
