Open Access

In the article “Public-Access Debate Continues” (C&EN, Aug. 16, page 38) an executive of the American Association of Publishers, of which ACS is a member, asserts that “no one-size-fits-all embargo period [before free public access of published content is permitted] would make sense in journal publishing across the diverse economic models that exist for publishers.” But the reality is that a large percentage of publications, including those of ACS, enforce an infinitely long embargo period.

With the exception of a selected few papers, free access is not available to any article of any age in ACS journals, Nature journals, Tetrahedron Letters, Chemical Communications, JAMA, Lancet, and many others. What “economic model” for ACS publications provides a rationale for the $30 payment required to retrieve a PDF file of the 54-year-old publication that describes the results in my Berkeley Ph.D. thesis [Wolff, M. E., and Oneto, J. F. “Synthesis of Some 1-Phenyl-2-amino-3-substituted-amino-1-
propanols from α-Oximino Mannich Bases” J. Am. Chem. Soc., 78, No. 11 (1956): 2615–2618]?

ACS and other publishers of scientific literature should review and shorten their overlong embargo policies in the interests of the advancement of science—an enduring objective from the time of Newton and Pasteur. Some scientific societies, for example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the British Pharmacological Society, already provide free access after 12 months.

Manfred E. Wolff
Laguna Beach, Calif.