The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has responded to the Research Councils UK (RCUK)’s Proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs to help inform RCUK on enhancing scientific communications in a sustainable manner. Adopting the wrong open access (OA) model would ‘destroy scientific communications’, RSC chief Dr. Robert Parker has warned Cambridge MP Julian Huppert. Throwing away one of Britain’s few GDP-positive industries by adopting an unsustainable OA model would ‘destroy the fabric of scientific communications’, he said.
Dr. Parker said scientific publishers were approaching a critical juncture in relation to OA publishing, as both the government and the RCUK currently reviewed the model with a number of options being considered.
He welcomed Dr. Huppert to the RSC’s home at Thomas Graham House, Cambridge Science Park, at the launch of the society’s latest journal, Biomaterials Science. However, he cautioned the government and funding bodies not to undermine the effectiveness of scientific communications, an area in which UK organisations excelled.
Under the RSC’s ‘Open Science’ model, authors are currently offered the option of paying a fee in exchange for making their peer reviewed research paper openly available to all via the RSC web platform.
Biomaterials Science is a collaborative venture between the RSC and the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), Kyoto University, Japan. It will be a multidisciplinary journal covering the fundamental science of biomaterials and their potential biomedical applications.
Norio Nakatsuji, Professor and Director at WPI Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences, Kyoto University, has been appointed co-editor-in-chief of the new journal.
