The Electrochemical Society is making all of its digital content—more than 120,000 articles—available for free this week.

The effort is in honor of Open Access Week, which this year runs Oct. 19-25, and ECS hopes it will demonstrate the importance of having a free repository of scientific research open and available to the public.

“We have been increasing the number of articles we publish as open access at no cost to the author for almost two years now,” Mary Yess, deputy executive director and publisher of ECS, said in a statement. “But we wanted to take the opportunity of Open Access Week to show the world our vision: all of our content freely available to anyone who wants to read it.”

The association is working on a two-phase, long-term plan to eventually open all of its content. Phase one began in February 2014 and allows authors to choose if they would like their manuscripts that are submitted for publication in ECS journals to be accessed openly. With this option, authors can pick from a variety of copyright licenses, with varying levels of permissions. For example, they can choose a “Creative Commons By” license, which allows anyone to redistribute the material as long as the original author is credited.

ECS is also making some of its content available for free, while maintaining the copyright, so that people can reuse and redistribute that content with the society’s permission.

Providing open access to its digital library is not inexpensive, Yess told Associations Now, so in order to complete phase two of its plan and open all content, ECS is planning to launch a fundraising campaign in the near future.

“We hope to open up all of our content in our digital library to everyone without any author paying what’s called an article processing charge, without any reader paying any kind of pay-per-view or other kind of charge, and without any library paying for a subscription,” Yess said.

Representing scientists and researchers working to solve sustainability problems such as access to clean water and sanitation, ECS believes opening its content can help people around the world. Open access “will help all of us to solve problems that are very pressing right now,” Yess said.

(iStock/Thinkstock)