Free the Science: One Scholarly Society’s bold vision for open access and why it matters now more than ever

By Ellen Finnie, original post from IO: In the Open

The Electrochemical Society, a small nonprofit scholarly society founded in 1902, has an important message for all of us who are concerned about access to science.   Mary Yess, Deputy Executive Director and Chief Content Officer and Publisher, could not be clearer about the increased urgency of ECS’ path:  “We have got to move towards an open science environment. It has never been more important – especially in light of the recently announced ‘gag orders’ on several US government agencies– to actively promote the principles of open science.”    What they committed to in 2013 as an important open access initiative has become, against the current political backdrop, truly a quest to “free the science.”

ECS’s “Free the Science” program is designed to accelerate the ability of the research ECS publishes — for example, in sustainable clean energy, clean water, climate science, food safety, and medical care — to generate solutions to our planet’s biggest problems.  It is a simple and yet powerful proposition, as ECS frames it:

“We believe that if this research were openly available to anyone who wished to read it, anywhere it the world, 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.”

How this small society — which currently publishes just 2 journals — came to this conclusion, and how they plan to move to an entirely open access future, is, I believe, broadly instructive at a time when our political environment has only one solid state: uncertainty.

ECS’s OA Mission: Free The Science

When we first started to think about how OA applied to our publications program, we did a very simple thing: we looked at our organizational mission, and asked ourselves whether that helped us formulate a plan in the face of potentially very disruptive changes occurring in the publishing landscape.

It did.

Our mission, since our formation in 1902, has been to quickly and efficiently exchange information and ideas among those interested in electrochemistry.

That made it easy. ECS started publishing journals because it was the fastest and most efficient way to disseminate information at the time: but “the times, they are a-changin’.” Open Access was a blindingly obvious progression for our publishing program in light of our mission: we wanted to be Open Access, we wanted to be completely Open Access, and we wanted to be Open Access NOW.

And more than that: as we thought about what Open Access meant, and as we engaged with the thinking behind it, we realized something else. The science we are custodians of is critically important to the future of our planet. The science that we publish addresses energy storage, renewable energy, sanitation, sensors, corrosion: all hugely important to the way we live now and to improving people’s lives across the world. We should be aiming to make this science freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. We shouldn’t be charging people – or institutions – to read it; and we also shouldn’t be charging scientists to share their findings. We should be facilitating the free exchange of high quality information in every way we could.

Fundamentally, we believed that Open Access was core to our mission and was something that we both wanted – and needed – to achieve.

And so Free The Science was born. We decided that we would endeavor to create an endowment fund that would allow us to carry on publishing this important work, without charging our readers or authors. In the meantime, we would put in place some transitional plans and products to help move us towards our goal, while we marshaled our resources into fundraising for this very exciting vision of our future.

Which is where we are today.

-Mary Yess
ECS Deputy Executive Director & Chief Content Officer