In the context of the conference GFP 2019 on polymer chemistry, I am taking part in a roundtable on Open Access. Chemists are coming quite late to the Open Access debate. The preprint archive Chemrxiv is young, not widely used, and not independent from publishers. The traditional subscription-based publishing system, and the standard bibliometric indicators, dominate communication and evaluation. And when chemists are dragged into the debate by discipline-agnostic initiatives such as Plan S, their positions tend to be conservative.
Inevitably, chemists are being affected by Open Access and other evolutions of the research system, whether or not these evolutions seem beneficial to them. It would be useful for chemists to know more about preprints and other tools of scientific communication, beyond the traditional journals: not only to comply with Open Access mandates, but also to make their own choices among the existing innovations and best practices.
