The UK's Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced that it is now rolling out its 'Gold for Gold' open access (OA) initiative worldwide. This follows a successful pilot in the UK. 'Gold for Gold' was launched in July this year, as an innovative experiment to support British researchers as they begin the funder led transition to Gold OA.
UK research institutions who are 'RSC Gold' customers were provided with credits equal in value to their subscription payment to make their papers available via Open Science - the RSC's Gold OA option. The RSC took this action to enable researchers, who are being asked to publish OA but who don't have the funding yet to pay for it directly, to meet their funders' requirements. The initiative equated to the RSC donating over £1million worth of Gold OA 'Article Publication Fees' (APCs) to the UK research community during 2012.
The response from the community has reportedly been excellent, with the number of universities from across the UK signing up approaching 60. Following positive feedback from UK researchers - and responding to enquiries from the US, Japan, Australia, Denmark and many other nations - the RSC is now rolling 'Gold for Gold' out across the world in 2013.
It is expected that the global initiative will credit universities worldwide with over £5 million worth of voucher codes to make their research papers available through the RSC's OA option - at no cost to researchers.
According to RSC representatives, researchers are utilising the free OA credits across the breadth of its journals portfolio, including papers accepted for publication in its high impact flagship journals such as Chemical Science and Chemical Communications.
