After the top journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) went dark in December after the Trump administration cut funding to its parent organisation, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has stepped in and will now run it. When the ACS announced the deal yesterday, it brought relief to many in the research community who feared the 53-year-old premier publication might be dead.
Previously published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), EHP was one of the few peer-reviewed journals funded by the government. It published research on the relationship between the environment and human health and has an impact factor of 10.
But the journal announced in April that it would no longer accept new submissions because of funding constraints at the NIEHS and its parent organisation the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Then, in December, the journal’s website was taken offline after the contracts that maintained the site expired in November. This combination of events led to concerns in the research community that the journal and its content had disappeared entirely.
In announcing the acquisition, the ACS said it aims to minimise further disruption for EHP authors and readers and plans to re-open the journal to submissions in early 2026. In addition, EHP’s previously published content will be hosted on the ACS website in the coming months.
‘The addition of EHP strengthens ACS’ portfolio in environmental health and further broadens it into the medical space; it allows ACS to serve a scientific community in need,’ states Sarah Tegen, ACS’ chief publishing officer and the senior vice president of ACS Publications.
From diamond to gold
The journal will remain open access and all article publishing charges (APCs) will be waived for manuscripts submitted to the journal until the end of the year.
EHP will transition from diamond open access, where it was free for authors to publish and published papers were immediately accessible, to gold open access, where authors will have to pay an APC.
Open access: a guide to the different models
Gold open access sees the final versions of research articles published immediately with unrestricted and free access for readers. Authors, their institutions or research funders pay article processing charges (APCs) to cover publishing costs.
Green or self-archiving open access allows authors to deposit a version of their manuscript – usually a preprint or post-print – in an institutional repository or subject-based archive. It is made freely available, often after an embargo period defined by the publisher. Authors are not required to pay fees. However, the publicly accessible version may not be the final formatted article published by the journal.
Bronze represents publications that are made free-to-read on the publisher’s website but don’t qualify as gold because access is for a limited time, the licence is unclear or is not a Creative Commons one.
Hybrid journals apply traditional subscription fees, but authors have the option to make individual articles open access by paying an APC. This means that some articles are free to read, while others require a subscription.
Diamond or platinum refers to journals that provide immediate open access without charging authors a fee. Universities, scholarly societies or government funding often pays the publishing costs. Many society-run journals and university presses follow the diamond model.
‘It has become clear over the last several months that there was a lot of concern about what would happen with this journal, and it’s a huge relief to have it in the hands of an established, effective publisher to ensure that the journal goes on,’ Joel Kaufman, EHP’s editor-in-chief, tells Chemistry World.
The ACS has expressed an interest in maintaining the same academic editorial team, Kaufman adds. ‘We presume that includes the deputy editors, editor, associate editors and so forth,’ he continues, saying he expects the editorial board’s members to stay on as well.
Sven Jordt at the Duke University School of Medicine’s toxicology and environmental health programme says the ACS is a ‘robust’ and ‘financially solid’ publisher that provides ‘a really good home for EHP’. But several aspects of the new deal concern him, including the fact that ACS publishes several other environmental journals, like EST Letters and Chemical Research in Toxicology where there could be some overlap between these journals.
‘With these competing journals, the ACS needs to figure out where EHP will stand … so its leadership position and impact factor can be maintained and that [its papers] are not siphoned off by the other journals,’ Jordt states.
Potential conflict of interest?
Jordt notes that the ACS receives significant chemical industry contributions for its awards and collaborative research initiatives and suggests this could pose a conflict of interest. ‘There’s obviously a concern now about moving from government funding and NIH oversight, where you don’t have industry conflicts of interest, and some in the field are worried about the closeness of ACS with industry,’ he says.
Jordt has served as a reviewer for ACS journals and says there have never been any indications that industry has influenced any editorial decisions or editorial appointments. Nevertheless, he urges the ACS to ensure that there is a firewall between such private donors and the editorial processes of its publications.
Jamie DeWitt, an environmental and molecular toxicologist at Oregon State University, points out that the NIH’s open access policy dictates all studies based on NIH-funded data must be published immediately and with no embargo. It is unclear whether NIH grantees can use their awards to pay those open access fees, she says.
‘Some of these fees are $3000 (£2229) to $5000, so that can be prohibitive and there is a likelihood that researchers would need to get that money from another source,’ DeWitt warns. ‘It is hard to say whether this will be a good move for the journal until we see that it remains as high quality as it was when housed within the NIH,’ she tells Chemistry World.
But overall, DeWitt says the development is promising. ‘The journal is still existing and that is really important,’ she states. ‘Currently there are no other ACS journals like EHP that would publish papers focusing on public health, epidemiology and toxicology so this represents an expansion.’
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