Are Chemical Journals Too Expensive and Inaccessible?

On October 25-26, 2005, the Chemical Sciences Roundtable held a workshop to explore issues involving those who use and contribute to chemical literature, as well as those who publish and disseminate chemical journals. As a follow-up to the workshop, a summary was written to capture the presentations and discussions that occurred during the workshop. As a forum to discuss chemistry journals within the larger context of scientific, technical and medical journal publishing, the workshop covered whether chemists and chemical engineers have unique journal needs and, if so, whether these needs are being met in the current journal publishing environment. Workshop participants also tackled how open access publishing might be applied to the chemical literature, such as to provide authors more freedom to distribute their articles after publication and allowing free access to chemical literature archives. Table of ContentsFront Matter1 Overview2 Historical Perspective3 Challenges of Web Publication4 Cost5 Access6 Archives7 Open AccessAppendix A Workshop AgendaAppendix B List of ParticipantsAppendix C Biographic Sketches of Workshop SpeakersAppendix D Origin of and Information on the Chemical Sciences Roundtable