Journal pioneering open access marks 20th Anniversary

Professor Ken Carslaw is the co-executive editor and one of the founding committee of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, which led the way in open access publishing and public peer review.

The journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) is celebrating its 20th Anniversary. ACP has been a forerunner in open access publishing and public peer review. The founders developed a model which uses open peer review where reviewer comments, author replies and additional public comments from the scientific community are published immediately and all articles published are accessible free of charge.  

ICAS member, Professor Ken Carslaw is the co-executive editor of ACP and was one of the scientists to help establish this new model for scientific publication as a member of the first ACP executive committee.  

Over the past 20 years ACP has grown to become a key journal in atmospheric science, receiving around a thousand submissions a year. Their open access and public peer review model has been seen to ensure high levels of scientific transparency and integrity and provided a fairer peer review system for authors, as a result this model has now been adopted by twenty other European Geoscience Union journals and similar concepts have been implemented in other scientific areas. 

Professor Carslaw commented “We are all used to open access now, but in the geosciences it started with ACP. And to add to that transformation, ACP has published around 60,000 reviews, replies and other comments in the true spirit of open science”. 

These achievements were celebrated at a special meeting which was held at the Max-Planck-Institute in Mainz, Germany on 19th September 2022.