The achemso package has provided the standard BibTeX styles following the American Chemical Society (ACS) guidelines since before I started using LaTeX. I’ve looked after achemso since 2008, and took it from a simple BibTeX .bst to a bundle including submission class, a demo document and other goodies.

I started the class many years ago, and with hindsight some of it was not such a great plan. More importantly, the ACS have never used LaTeX in production, which has always meant that using a dedicated class was a bit awkward: getting things into a specific class only for them to strip that out again. I’ve therefore recently agreed with the ACS to move from a dedicated class to a simple template, now available on GitHub and soon to appear on the ACS website. Authors can then simply use article with minor adjustments and get something that is suitable for production.

At the same time, classical BibTeX styles, whilst still widely used, are better replaced by biblatex methods. That opens up a lot of flexibility to the user, and avoids needing add-on packages to provide control or compound citations.

So I’m marking achemso as for historical support only, and recommending all new content shifts to updated approaches. I’ll keep achemso working of course: not that there should be much to do! But it’s time for people to move away from what was a rather rigid approach in new documents.