A few economic figures may help to explain why chemistry scholars showed reluctance to adopt open science practices, including pre-publishing their work in preprint form after the early successful attempts with the Chemistry Preprint Server [5]. It is enough to ask even a prolific author in the chemical sciences if she/he knows what is the cost paid by her/his institution’s library to access a chemistry journal, and what is the market concentration level of the publishing industry in chemistry. Most often, she/he will be generally surprised to learn that chemistry has historically recorded the highest average journal serial prices [33]; and that in 2020 the average price for chemistry journals, exceeding the $6,300 threshold, was the highest amid all disciplines (Table 4). For comparison, in 2016 the average price for chemistry journals was $5,105 [34]. Similarly, a few chemistry scholars are aware that only five publishing organisations control publishing of more than 70% of chemistry studies [8].
Today, chemistry scholars can publish their work in preprint form on several preprint servers including ChemRxiv, Preprints, SSRN, Authorea, ResearchSquare, Zenodo, Beilstein Archives, OSF Preprints, ResearchGate and many others. Learning that preprints differ only slightly in comparison to peer reviewed journal articles for all the basic sciences (physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology) further supports the widespread adoption of preprints amid scholars of all basic sciences, including chemistry.
I agree with Polka [35] and with other open science researchers [36] who found that the key challenge for the transition to open science is cultural change. To effectively foster said cultural change requires, in its turn, to expand the education of doctoral students and young researchers to include scholarly communication in the digital age [37]. The preliminary findings of this study will contribute to inform the curriculum of the aforementioned new courses for young chemistry scholars, eventually promoting accelerated innovation in chemistry [38], and the associated social, economic and environmental benefits due to the fact that chemistry, unique amid all basic sciences, originates a huge global industry which is central to the economic wealth of every nation [39].

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