The Royal Society, in an exciting new chapter for its scientific publishing, sets out how it will transition its primary research journals to open access and make more of its world-leading research available to all. Following a review by its Council, the Royal Society has committed to ‘flipping’ the journals Biology Letters, Interface, Proceedings A, and Proceedings B to a fully open access model when 75% of articles are being published open access.
This transition will be driven chiefly by the expansion of Read & Publish agreements with major research institutions, enabling their scientific research output to be published open access in the Society’s journals.
The process is already well underway, the Society launched Royal Society Read & Publish in January 2021 and has pioneered new agreements – including a shared funding arrangement announced this year with the University of California.
To underscore this commitment and to provide an additional compliant route for researchers, the Society will seek “transformative journal” status from the cOAlition S, the consortium of research organisations and funders supporting the Plan S open access initiative. This requires committing to flip the journals to open access at the 75% threshold, to transparent pricing and to an annual increase in the proportion of articles published open access.
The move follows a review of the Society’s publishing strategy involving both Fellows and other experts. It continues the open access journey the Society began in 2006, with the introduction of open access publishing as an option on all articles and the launch of Open Biology in 2011, and Royal Society Open Science in 2014.
Open access policies across the Society’s journals already comply with all existing funder requirements and the past year has seen further rapid transformation in the Society’s publishing processes. This includes cross-publisher work to support rapid peer review and publication of research relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic in an open access collection.
In total, the Society publishes 10 journals, including the six which are already open access or part of the OA75 commitment. The remaining four journals; including the world’s first peer-reviewed journals, Philosophical Transactions A and B; Interface Focus; and the history of science journal Notes and Records, will continue to operate on a hybrid model for the time being.
The Society – along with other publishers of journals which commission content directly from authors – recognises that such journals are unlikely to progress to the 75% open access threshold at the same rate, if at all. The future publishing model for these journals, and the Society’s wider output, will be kept under review as the publishing landscape continues to evolve and new ways of supporting research continue to emerge.
Tags: Open access journal Research, Read & Publish agreements, Open access
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