Open Access and us

Open access publishing is one of our strategic priorities, supporting our mission to advance excellence in the chemical sciences

Jan Kuras, Royal Society of Chemistry

What is ‘open access’ publishing?

Open access (OA) is “free and permanent unrestricted access to journal articles where authors retain copyright to their work and license it so that it can be redistributed and reused freely, provided full accurate attribution is given”.

It's vital to stress that for high-quality prestigious publishers, OA is not an opportunity for self-publishing or a means to bypass peer review.

Essentially, open access only differs from traditional subscription publishing in who pays; either to publish or access content. For subscription, the publisher carries out the publication services and charges a subscription fee for access. In OA, authors are charged by the publisher for the publishing service and access to articles is free to all.

For the Royal Society of Chemistry, the criteria and quality control for both business models is identical: the journals have editors and an editorial board; online submission and publishing systems; rigorous peer review standards; and we strive for inclusion in indexing services and to obtain impact factors.

How did OA come about?

Several factors inspired the development of OA.

• The ‘serials crisis’ which describes the chronic subscription cost increases of many scholarly journals. The prices of institutional and library subscriptions have been rising fast for several decades, while library budgets have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly cancelled serial subscriptions, meaning the articles published in these journals are not made available for researchers to use
• The creation of new digital publishing opportunities and technologies
• A progressive “open” movement demanding unrestricted access to publicly-funded research
• Requirements from funding organisations for research outputs to be made freely available to maximise dissemination of the research they fund. For example, the Research Councils UK mandated that from April 2013 outputs from their funded research submitted for publication must be made open with the most liberal licence, giving readers unrestricted reuse rights. And with effect from 2016, the Higher Education Funding Council for England states that for articles to be included in a Research Excellence Framework assessment, the article metadata must be deposited within three months of acceptance in a repository, and the article must be made available via OA

Green and Gold

Over time, two different OA models have emerged, Gold and Green.

Gold OA publishing gives immediate access to articles after peer review. The author pays for publication, which covers:

• editorial tasks (handling manuscripts through peer review to publication)
• technical input (development and maintenance of online journal systems)
• production (formatting of articles, inclusion in indexing services)
• marketing (ensuring readers know about journals and articles)
• customer services (responding to authors, referees, readers etc).

Green OA publishing involves self-archiving of articles in institutional repositories with no publication charge. Articles are not available immediately but can typically be accessed 6-24 months after publication.

Pure gold OA journals and so-called hybrid journals, with subscription and OA content, now also exist. Publication charges can be paid directly out of research funds or central funds provided by some funding organisations and institutions. Some journals cover costs via sponsorship, so there are no direct charges for authors.

So what does this mean for our journals?

We want to support OA models that make sure scholarly publishing activities operate in a long-term, sustainable way, while also maximising availability and accessibility of research, maintaining standards and ethics of publishing, and providing a quality publishing service.

To achieve this, we provide Gold OA options for all our current journals. In addition, our multidisciplinary high-impact journal Chemical Science moved to fully Gold OA from 2015, with publication charges waived for two years. This is a bold and exciting move which immediately puts us at the forefront of high quality chemistry OA publishing.

We can facilitate Green OA via our Chemical Science Article Repository, with full text of the article available 12 months after publication.

How we’re helping authors – Gold for Gold

We recognise that researchers are being asked to publish OA but may not have the funding. Gold for Gold is an initiative for all RSC Gold subscribing institutions where voucher codes are provided to publish Gold OA at no extra cost. The number of voucher codes received by an institution is based on the RSC Gold subscription divided by our standard publication charge.

Next steps

We want to provide a trusted voice during the growth of OA publishing, work with the community to support their requirements and be involved in the discussions about directions in academic publishing. To help with that we are:

• updating our web pages and other materials to accurately reflect OA policies
• enhancing our editorial and production systems to support OA publishing as effectively as subscription publishing
• developing appropriate OA content and journals to meet the needs of the chemical science community

Open access is generating a wide range of opinions – get in touch with your thoughts or any feedback you receive during your interactions with researchers and the wider chemical science community.