Open Access Program

About Open Access

The research published in ECS journals is of huge importance to the future of our planet. Developments in sustainable clean energy and water, food safety, and medical care are just a few of the areas where research published in our journals is helping to accelerate solutions.

We believe that if this research were openly available to anyone, anywhere in the world, who wished to read it, it would contribute to faster problem-solving and technology development; accelerate the pace of scientific discovery; encourage innovation; enrich education; and even stimulate the economy.

This is where ECS Open Access comes in. Open access means that an article is freely available online to anyone who wishes to see it. The reader neither pays for it directly nor belongs to an institution that subscribes to the journal in which it appears.

Enabling open access to scientific research is imperative to ECS’s mission to disseminate the best research in our technical fields as widely as possible. Help further our mission by publishing your next ECS article as Author Choice Open Access.

Find out more about our open access initiative and what you can do to help ECS Free the Science.

Article processing charges 2023 (APCs)

ECS standard 2023 open access processing charges (APC) 

*APC charges will be waived for 2022 and 2023 for these new gold open-access journals.

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Article processing charges 2024 (APCs)

ECS standard 2024 open access processing charges (APC) 

*APC charges will be waived for 2022, 2023, and 2024 for these new gold open-access journals.

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ECS Plus subscribers

ECS Plus is a subscription to the entire ECS Digital Library, PLUS unlimited article credits for affiliated authors to the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology. To take advantage of an article credit, authors from ECS Plus-affiliated institutions must select ECS Plus under Step 6 – Open Access Waivers, Charges and Credits at the time of manuscript submission. Researchers from over 1,000 institutions qualify! Check if your institution subscribes.

Download and share the Publish Open Access with ECS Plus guide.

If your institution would like to learn more about adding ECS Plus to their subscription package, contact customerservices@ioppublishing.org.

Transformative Agreements and Institutional Open Access Agreements

As a publishing partner of the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP), ECS content is included in several Transformative and/or Institutional Open Access Agreements around the globe. Agreements of this nature are put in place between colleges, universities, funders, consortia, and other organizations to support authors by eliminating the cost of article publication charges (APCs) for open access publishing. These agreements quite often enable authors to read and or publish on an open access bases at no direct cost to the author.

To learn if your institution is covered under a Transformative and/or Institutional Open Access Agreement—or how to submit your content under such an agreement—please visit the IOPP Transformative Agreement home page for the most up-to-date details and search tools.

ECS members

As part of ECS’s membership package, members and student members receive a 75 percent discount on ECS APCs.

Institutional members

Authors affiliated with an ECS institutional member organization may receive a limited number of article credits as part of their membership package.

Open access and copyright

In place of a copyright transfer, authors who wish to make their articles open access are asked to sign an exclusive Open Access Publishing Agreement with ECS. Copyright remains with the author(s). Authors must select a Creative Commons usage license to attach to the work. This defines how the general public may use the article.

ECS offers authors CC BY or CC BY–NC–ND Creative Commons licenses.

More information about the licenses can be found on the Creative Commons website.

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