The University of California, via the California Digital Library, subscribes to ECS Plus. This subscription grants access to the ECS Digital Library to the entire UC community, and allows all papers with a UC-affiliated author to be published Open Access free of charge.

Who is covered?

Any author who is affiliated with any of the UC campuses, UC Office of the President, or Lawrence Berkeley Lab, with the exception of UCSF, as UCSF is not currently participating in the agreement.

If the corresponding author is not affiliated with UC, he or she should forward the acceptance letter to the UC-affiliated author to claim the article credit.

What journals are covered?

All journals published by the Electrochemical Society in the ECS Digital Library. ECS monographs are published by Wiley, and are therefore not included in this agreement.

What is the discount?

The APC for publication in these journals is fully waived.

How can I apply this discount?

Begin the submission process to an ECS journal as normal. During Step 2: Manuscript Information, you will find an Author Open Choice section. Indicate that you wish to publish your paper as Open Access, and identify yourself as belonging to an ECS Plus subscribing institution.

Upon acceptance, you will receive an email instructing you to visit CCC RightsLink to claim your OA credit. Follow the supplied link and complete the payment form, being sure to use the Apply Discounts button and select your institution so that the APC waiver is properly applied.

What licenses are available?

Creative Commons licenses CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND. Authors select a license during the manuscript submission process.

For more information about the importance of license selection and Creative Commons in open access publishing, see this NEJM Perspective.

What is the business model behind this arrangement?

UC pays a slightly increased license fee over what access to the ECS Digital Library would normally cost, in exchange for ECS Plus, which grants unlimited Article Credits to UC-affiliated authors. This fee is paid at the start of each year as a part of the license fee and is not dependent on the number of Article Credits distributed to authors.

For more information about Open Access at ECS, including details about ECS’s Free The Science initiative, see Open Access at ECS.