In celebration of its ninth annual Free the Science Week (April 6-14, 2025), The Electrochemical Society (ECS) again took down the paywall to the entire ECS Digital Library. For the duration of the week, readers had unrestricted access to almost 440,000 articles and abstracts, producing swells in ECS page visits and content usage that attest to the enduring relevance and value of the open access initiative. Downloads from the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES), ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS), ECS Meeting Abstracts, ECS Interface, and ECS Transactions (ECST) jumped from 281,260 in 2024 to 518,132 in 2025—an 84 percent increase!
Most-downloaded ECS articles
Three JES articles were the overall most-downloaded articles during Free the Science Week:
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Fluorinated Carbonate-Based Electrolyte for High-Voltage Li(Ni0.5Mn0.3Co0.2)O2/Graphite Lithium-Ion Battery, Jinsol Im, Jieun Lee, Myung-Hyun Ryou, Yong Min Lee, and Kuk Young Cho
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Editors’ Choice—Molten Salt Electrolysis in Chloride Melts for Energy-Efficient Iron Metal Production, Anar Badalbayli, Nicholas Sinclair, Eunjeong Kim, Alexander A. Baker, and Rohan Akolkar
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Pore Structure and Durability Improvement of CNovel® Mesoporous Carbon as a Support Material for Pt Catalysts in Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells, Hideo Daimon, Hideo Inoue, and Minoru Inaba
The #1 most-downloaded article for each ECS publication during Free the Science Week was:
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JES: Fluorinated Carbonate-Based Electrolyte for High-Voltage Li(Ni0.5Mn0.3Co0.2)O2/Graphite Lithium-Ion Battery, Jinsol Im, Jieun Lee, Myung-Hyun Ryou, Yong Min Lee, and Kuk Young Cho
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JSS: Review—Silicon Nitride and Silicon Nitride-Rich Thin Film Technologies: State-of-the-Art Processing Technologies, Properties, and Applications, Alain E. Kaloyeros, Youlin Pan, Jonathan Goff, and Barry Arkles
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ECS Interface: Call for Papers: 207th ECS Meeting
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ECS Transactions: Mapping a Sustainable Future Through Conceptualization of Transformative Learning Framework, Education for Sustainable Development, Critical Reflection, and Responsible Citizenship: An Exploration of Pedagogies for Twenty-First Century Learning, Ashraf Alam
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ECS Meeting Abstracts: High Performance Protonic Ceramic Electrochemical Cells Operating at <500°C, Fan Liu, Hao Deng, Bin Liu, and Chuancheng Duan
Supporting Open Access
The Society’s support for free and open access to scholarly publication is evidenced by Free the Science Week—an initiative that is exclusively ECS’s—and the Society’s participation in International Open Access Week—a global event where open access advocates join together, take action, and raise awareness of the benefits of openly sharing knowledge. ECS also publishes two gold open access publications, ECS Sensors Plus and ECS Advances, which are 100 percent open access. In 2024, ECS published 581 papers open access, accounting for 37.8 percent of all articles.
For more information on publishing open access with ECS, consult our Open Access Program.