The American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry, each publishing tens of subscription journals, lead the ranking. Furthermore, referring to articles published by the aforementioned learned societies over the previous 3-year window (2015-2017), the average number of citations per paper was substantially higher for subscription journals when compared to OA journals [6].
Alone, these two facts help to explain why in 2018 still 74% of the chemistry papers were published in subscription journals [5]. Chemistry is the most concentrated segment of the scientific publishing industry, with only five publishers publishing more than 70% of chemistry studies in 2013 [24]. More recently, with 207 journals from 20 publishers, chemistry was found to be the third (after multidisciplinary and space science) scientific discipline in terms of market concentration measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index [21].
Another highly reputed learned society, the American Physical Society, ranks third amid the largest 20 publishers classified by number of average citations received to articles published in 2016, 2017 and 2018 displayed in Table 5. In this case, however, the number of citations of articles published in OA journals is almost twice higher than that in non-OA journals [6]. The reason is due to the fact that physicists are familiar with OA papers thanks both to preprints posted in arXiv since the early 1990s and widespread use of “green” self-archiving.

4 Openly accessible, impactful science

“If you include journal impact factors in the list of publications in your curriculum”, wrote Curry citing the Seglen’s 1992 work [25] showing the highly skewed pattern of citation distribution for which only a few papers in a journal account for most of the journal’s total citations, “you are statistically illiterate” [26].
Now, given the fact that universities and research bodies continue to use the journal impact factor and other citation-based metrics such as the h-index [27] to evaluate researchers and for granting research funds, it is not surprising that researchers continue to strive to publish in high JIF journals.
For example, in a few months some 34,000 biologists signed the online petition initiative by Varmus, Brown, and Eisen calling by late 2000 all scientists to “pledge that, beginning in September 2001, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date” [28]. Actually, most signatories continued to publish their work in paywalled journals (and to review journal manuscripts for free, as well).
Yet, as noted by Harnad in 2005 [29], over 90% of journals gave author the permission to self-archive their papers on personal websites or in institutional repositories. Underlining the inconsistency, Harnad continued:
«Now SUPPOSE that – in addition to performing the keystrokes required to sign the 2001 PLOS open letter (pledging to boycott journals unless they become OA journals), each of the 34,000 PLOS signatories had also performed (or deputized a librarian, secretary or student to perform for them) the few further keystrokes it would have required to make just one of their own year-2001 articles OA by self-archiving it, free for all, on the web. «THEN the number of OA articles (34,000) resulting from just that minimal act would already have doubled (to 60%) the percentage of OA articles (34%) among the approximately 55,000 Biology articles indexed by ISI in 2001; it would also have exceeded the total number of articles published by both BioMed Central and PLOS journals from 2001 to the present (c. 20,000) [29
The very same inconsistency was noted in 2014 for scholars of all disciplines upon analyzing 1,066,079 articles published between 1999 and 2011 (social sciences 91,729 articles, life sciences 202,833 articles, health sciences 282,096 articles, and physical sciences 489,421 articles), 80.4% of which could be self-archived after one year of publication either on personal webpages (78.1 % of articles) or in institutional repositories (79.9%), whereas around 12% of total annual articles are actually self-archived [30].
“The results” wrote Laakso concluding the study, “highlight the substantial unused potential for green OA” [30]. This fact provides evidence that today’s scholars in large part are unaware of the possibilities offered by today’s scholarly communication and further substantiates my viewpoint for which the full transition to open science requires new education of today’s doctoral students and early career researchers on scholarly communication in the digital era [8].

5 Outlook and Conclusions

OA academic publishing is thriving. In 2019, MDPI, an OA multidisciplinary publisher jointly established by a former research chemist in 1996, became the 5th world’s largest academic publisher with over 106,000 articles published in one year only [31]. Several MDPI journals are devoted to chemistry, nanotechnology and materials science. The APCs across the aforementioned journals are in the order of CHF 1,600. Most publishers of “gold” OA journals offer discounts on the APCs, for example to scholars submitting from developing countries, and even waive them in certain cases.
Given the APC levels shown in Table 4 it may not be surprising to learn that even in the USA, a wealthy nation leading for over a century the global scientific production, OA publishing in journals levying an APC is used in a disproportionately larger fraction from professors at elite institutions [32], namely at research centres receiving huge grants.
With the early success of the Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS) publishing some 500 studies from scholars based in 51 countries two years after its launch in August 2000 http://preprint.chemweb.com [33], research chemists were the first after physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists to show real interest in open science. Today, the fact that chemistry scholars understand and value open science is shown for example by PubChem, an online repository for information on chemical substances and their biological activities, that 11 years after its inception in 2004 already hosted at https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov more than 157 million chemical substance descriptions [34].
Put simply, most research chemists never received education on today’s scholarly communication and on open science. The result is that still in the early 2020s, the vast majority of them does not self-archive research papers in institutional and personal websites, thereby losing the opportunities for enhanced use (and citation) of their own work.
Whether new chemical methods, materials, ideas or models, the main objective of any chemistry scholar is to see her/his findings used by the global chemistry community which, unique amid all scientific disciplines, includes researchers working for a huge global industry comprising chemical (and pharmaceutical) companies which is central to the wealth of any country [35].
Likewise to any other scholar in the basic sciences, chemistry scholars are also interested in citations which still place a central role in review, promotion and tenure procedures used by their employers. By quickly fulfilling the “unused potential for green OA” [30], chemistry scholars should make their papers openly accessible through self-archiving on institutional or personal websites, and publish in preprint form any new works. Beyond recording rapid increase in the number of citations, the same scholars will enjoy the benefits of open science in terms of enhanced collaboration, job and funding opportunities [36,37].
In other words, rather than paying the APCs of “gold” OA journals, chemistry scholars should take advantage of the new tools enabled by the internet and by progress in scholarly communication, freely publishing their own work first as preprint and then in any journal not levying any APC, namely “platinum” OA journals or even in “paywalled” journals. After the embargo period (often 12 months, but for certain journals 24 months), the published article will be self-archived either in institutional or personal websites.
In promotion and tenure processes, chemistry scholars are chiefly evaluated based on research, with evaluation often failing to reward teaching and service devaluing faculty work in these areas as it happens in most basic sciences [38]. Hence, by making their work openly accessible, they will enable improvement in all citation-based metrics still narrowly used to evaluate them, freeing time for teaching, sharing of knowledge with the public, writing books, grant proposals, and preparing teaching materials to foster student creativity in the digital age [39].
Inexorably, then, thanks to widespread uptake of OA publishing, research chemists will start to value the benefits of open scholarship including sharing of educational resources [40], thereby dramatically improving outcomes in all three main fields of academic activity: research, education an service to society.