About CCS Chemistry

CCS Chemistry

CCS Chemistry is the flagship English-language journal of the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS), based in Beijing and published open access by the society itself (print ISSN 2096-5745). Its first issue appeared in April 2019 — the first international journal independently founded by the society, and the founding act of the society's own publishing programme. It publishes a small, highly selective monthly selection of Communications, Mini Reviews and Research Articles across all areas of chemistry, free for readers and free for authors: a "diamond" open-access flagship intended, in the society's words, to present the best of Chinese chemistry to the world and to stand comparison with the leading general-chemistry journals published in the West.

The Chinese Chemical Society

The publisher is one of China's oldest scientific societies. The Chinese Chemical Society was founded in Nanjing on 4 August 1932, and its own account describes it as an academic organisation formed by Chinese chemists to unite chemists at home and abroad and promote the development of chemistry in China; it has more than 65,000 individual members and 151 organisational members, seven divisions covering the major areas of chemistry — physical, inorganic, organic, polymer, analytical, applied and chemical education — and twenty-nine commissions in subfields from catalysis to environmental chemistry. Before 2019 the society co-published twenty-six academic journals in Chinese and English with institutions around China, fifteen of them collected by the Science Citation Index. CCS Chemistry was a change of kind, not degree: the society's first journal owned and published solely by CCS itself, launched with its own international publishing programme and a new English-language platform, built with the Atypon publishing system, which recorded submissions rising by more than 75 per cent in the programme's first year.

Founding vision

The journal's editors have stated its founding vision with unusual clarity. In a fourth-anniversary editorial in 2023, the journal recalled that it "was originally envisioned to be a leading journal in the chemical sciences — addressing the need to have an international, top-quality general chemistry journal published by a professional scientific society in China," a vision credited to its inaugural editor-in-chief, Professor Jiannian Yao. The editorial notes that before CCS Chemistry, the overwhelming majority of internationally recognised chemistry journals were published by organisations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, and that most respected journals were subscription-based or charged authors fees; the goal was therefore "a high-quality, international, and completely open access journal that would serve the global chemistry community for years to come." The society's own description says the journal was established "to serve as the preeminent international chemistry journal published in China," and Chinese commentary on the journal describes its benchmarks openly as JACS and Angewandte Chemie International Edition — the flagship general journals of the American and German chemical societies, whose Chinese counterpart CCS Chemistry was designed to be.

Scope: all of chemistry

CCS Chemistry is, its scope statement says, "an English language journal that covers all areas of chemistry and the chemical sciences, including groundbreaking concepts, mechanisms, methods, materials, reactions, and applications." Its research areas run from analytical, inorganic, organic and physical chemistry through catalysis, chemical biology, materials and energy and environmental chemistry, and it stresses "the importance of chemistry for biomedical science, nanotechnology, energy, earth and planetary sciences, and many other areas of scientific endeavour." Two selection principles narrow that breadth. Articles must report transformative research with broad impact, of interest to chemists who are not experts in the subfield; and the journal states plainly that articles reporting incremental or specialised advances are not appropriate for it. A general journal that refuses the incremental is making an editorial bet: fewer papers, each expected to matter beyond its niche.

Selectivity and article types

The journal considers and publishes three article types: Communications, Mini Reviews and Research Articles. It publishes monthly, with fewer than fifteen articles per issue, and articles appear online as soon as they reach final publishable form. Its editors have quantified the selectivity: due to limited space, "only the top ~10% of manuscripts can be recommended for publication," and a later editorial restated the mechanism — to be recommended, manuscripts must be marked by reviewers in the "top 10% or higher" category for how transformative the work is to its field. In its first four years, the fourth-anniversary editorial records, the journal published just over one thousand articles, which had garnered more than twelve thousand citations. The founding editor-in-chief was Jiannian Yao, academician and president of the society; executive editorial leadership passed to Xi Zhang, academician at Jilin University, who signs the journal's recent editorials as editor-in-chief and reaffirms its description as "an international diamond open access journal."

Diamond open access

The journal's access model is its most distinctive publishing feature. All articles are fully open access — no subscription is required to read — "at no cost to contributing authors": no article-processing charges either. In the terminology its editor uses, it is a diamond open-access journal, a model in which the sponsoring society absorbs the costs of publication as a service to the discipline. The society underlines the point in its journal descriptions: owned and published solely by CCS, free to read and free to publish in. At a time when open access elsewhere increasingly means fees charged to authors, a top-selectivity flagship that charges neither side is a deliberate statement about what a national scientific society is for — and a competitive weapon in attracting the best Chinese and international manuscripts, since authors surrender neither access nor budget by choosing it.

First impact factor and reception

The society reported that in the 2022 Journal Citation Reports, released by Clarivate on 28 June 2022, CCS Chemistry received its first impact factor of 11.2, ranking twentieth among 230 journals in the Chemistry, Multidisciplinary category — an exceptional first rating for a journal then three years old, and the number its later profiles continue to cite. By the end of 2022 the society counted more than nine hundred published articles from countries and regions including China, the United States, Germany, Japan and Singapore, 2.17 million downloads, more than thirteen thousand citations, and over 4.6 million visits to the journal's website platform, about half of them international. The journal is included in Scopus, CAS, DOAJ, ESCI and other databases, as the society records. Its founding goal — "creating an independent world-class chemistry journal in China and publishing outstanding research results that have a real impact on the field of chemistry" — was, by those measures, substantially met within its first citation cycle.

The flagship and the family

CCS Chemistry anchors the society's journal family: it is the flagship around which the CCS publishing programme, launched simultaneously in 2019, has been built, standing above the society's twenty-six co-published Chinese- and English-language titles. That programme structure is why the journal matters beyond its own pages. A society that had spent eight decades co-publishing with institutes became, in 2019, a publisher in its own right, with its own platform, its own English-language web presence for its conferences and membership, and a flagship whose standards — transformative work only, top-decile recommendations, diamond open access — set the terms for everything published under its name. The journal's editorials mark the anniversaries of that programme as much as of the title.

Chemistry's centre of gravity

The journal is best understood as publishing infrastructure for a shift in world chemistry. China produces a very large share of the world's chemistry research, yet before 2019 its chemists published their best general work in journals owned in America and Europe. CCS Chemistry was created so that a Chinese society's journal could compete for that work — and for leading international work — on quality, visibility and openness rather than on national loyalty. Its editors insist the standard is global: papers must be transformative and of broad interest, the acceptance bar is the top tenth of submissions, and about half the journal's web readership was international within four years. Whether it ultimately stands beside JACS and Angewandte in prestige is a judgement for the discipline over decades; that it was built to be judged by that standard is a matter of record.

Readership

The journal addresses chemists across all subfields — the non-specialist chemist is its explicit target reader — together with researchers in the allied fields its scope names, from materials and energy to biomedicine and earth science. Its small monthly issues are designed to be browsed whole, in the manner of the great general-chemistry weeklies and monthlies, rather than searched only by specialists. Free to every reader and author, published from Beijing by the Chinese Chemical Society, CCS Chemistry is the society's flagship in the fullest sense: the journal by which Chinese chemistry presents itself, and its best work, to the world.