The Multifaceted Growth of JACS Au

As we reach the halfway point of calendar year 2024, with the announcement of our first full journal impact factor (JIF) from Clarivate Analytics, we reflect on the growth and evolution of the journal. Launched in 2020 and publishing our first issues in 2021, the journal has steadily grown in submissions and published output each year. This growth, including >50% growth in submissions in 2024 compared to 2023, signals the value that the global chemical community sees in JACS Au. Our first two-year JIF of 8.5, growing from our initial, single year JIF of 8.0 in a year where nearly all established journals had JIF reductions, signals our strength and promise for further growth. Our publications are roughly equally distributed among the three largest publishing regions of East Asia & the Pacific, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere, with Chinese and US researchers publishing the most papers in about equal fractions. The fact that authors in East Asia & the Pacific have published the largest fraction of papers in JACS Au, yet it is the region with the fewest open access mandates, speaks to the value our journal brings to the global community. What is that value? To start, a storied brand, with JACS being among the oldest, most respected names in all of chemistry. This brand reflects the broader ACS Publications portfolio’s reputation as the most trusted, most cited, and most read collection of chemistry journals in the world. ACS Publications offers rigorous peer review, rapid processing, and outstanding article production services. For example, JACS Au routinely completes peer review in 7–8 weeks (time of submission to time of acceptance) when gold open access journals from other publishers average 10, 20, or even 30 weeks. Our pool of outstanding reviewers managed by our diverse array of editors, who are all active researchers themselves, engenders great trust from our authors and readers, ensuring our published papers are among the best in chemistry. To expand the scope of the journal, we are adding a new paper type, becoming available for submission in August of this year. We are pleased to introduce Methods/Protocols to JACS Au. Methods/Protocols are manuscripts that provide a platform for researchers to report innovative experimental and computational methods and best laboratory practices relevant to their disciplines that would also be of interest to the broader scientific community. The goal of this manuscript type is to encourage and promote reproducibility and facile duplication of research by those skilled in the art, and to promote high scientific standards in the reporting of scientific methods. A few specialty journals within ACS Publications offer this manuscript type, and we are pleased to be the first ACS multidisciplinary journal to offer this manuscript format. Every year, ACS Publications seeks to make publication in ACS Au journals more straightforward. Whether you have a Letter, Article, Perspective, or Method/Protocol for JACS Au, ACS Publications’ growing collection of “Read and Publish” agreements with institutions and library consortia across the world makes open access publishing easier and easier. Today, ACS has agreements in more than 40 countries and covering more than 1500 institutions. Many agreements offer publication in open access journals like JACS Au and the ACS Au family of journals with no article processing charges paid by the authors. Publishing papers representing the full array of the ACS Publications portfolio, JACS Au seeks papers representing the top 10% of papers appearing in ACS specialty journals. We invite all our readers who have not yet become JACS Au authors to consider sending one of their future manuscripts to our journal. This article has not yet been cited by other publications.