Many relevant publishers offer open-access journals in the field of chemistry. The publication process is simplest when there are no costs involved, either for reading or for publishing.  

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists journals that are available via open access. You can filter for open-access journals in chemistry with no publication costs. 

To find a suitable open-access journal in your field, you can use the TIB’s B!SON tool. This tool suggests open-access journals from the DOAJ based on title, abstract and references, and allows you to adjust the maximum publication fees.

With so-called Diamond (synonym: Platinum) Open Access publishers, neither the submission of an article nor reader access incurs any costs for the authors, with funding being provided, for example, by the academic community. The articles are published under a CC BY licence to allow for the widest possible reuse.

In addition, it is also possible to publish via Open Access in subscription-based journals (hybrid option). In such cases, publication fees are partly covered by agreements between publishers and libraries/institutes, which are known as ‘publish-and-read’ models.

These include the DEAL arrangements concluded nationwide between research institutions and the publishers Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier, as well as other agreements, for example with the publishers Taylor & Francis or Thieme. You can usually check whether your own institution has concluded such agreements with the respective publishers on the journals’ websites, the publishers’ websites or your institution’s own website.

If direct publication in Open Access is not possible, most journals offer the option of making the article available in Open Access via self-archiving (Green Open Access). The legal conditions for self-archiving are summarised in the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Open Policy Finder. There are two distinct options:

• The submitted version of the article can be deposited as a preprint in a suitable preprint repository (see the ‘Submitted’ category in the Open Policy Finder).
• The accepted version of the article can be published in a suitable text repository after an embargo period (see the ‘Accepted’ category in the Open Policy Finder).