Open access agreements and how they work

Your authors will be clearly notified on screen in our system that they are eligible for the open access agreement and that they can publish open access with no APC to pay. They need to be the corresponding author assigned in our submission system and use their institutional email address to submit their article. Please refer to our step-by-step guide.

The full list of eligible journals is stated in your contract with us. Authors can use our Journal Finder tool to look up which Royal Society of Chemistry journals are included in your agreement and check their publication options. 

The agreement covers all research articles and review-type articles we publish. The full list of eligible journals and article types is stated in your contract with us. 

What system does Royal Society of Chemistry use for open access workflow? Do we need to approve articles?

Our licences and open access payments are processed by our own in-house system. You do not need to approve articles; we identify eligible articles automatically using the email address of the corresponding author as assigned in our submission system. You will receive a monthly report detailing all eligible articles.

Our licences and open access payments are processed by our own in-house system. You do not need to approve articles; we identify eligible articles automatically using the email address of the corresponding author as assigned in our submission system. You will receive a monthly report detailing all eligible articles.

You will receive a monthly report as a .xlsx file which includes all eligible articles which have been accepted for publication in Royal Society of Chemistry journals. Your monthly report will include publication meta data and persistent identifiers, for example: article DOIs; journal eISSNs; name and ORCID ID (where available) of the corresponding author; institutional affiliation and Ringgold ID; Funder IDs; publication dates; and open access licence details.  

Article eligibility is based on editorial acceptance date (‘latest decision date’ in the report). We identify eligible articles using the email address of the primary corresponding author as assigned in our submission system. If the author from your institution is an additional corresponding author on the article, we cannot automatically identify them, and they will not be included within the report. The institution or author can contact the Customer Services team to request to convert the article to open access under the agreement. 

You will receive notification by email of any articles where the author has chosen to opt-out of the agreement. Please contact your Sales account manager or the Customer Services team if you are not receiving these notifications.

Your monthly report details all articles which have been published open access and have used a voucher from your agreement. If you are close to your limit, you can request an up-to-date figure by contacting your Sales account manager or the Customer Services team. Our system automatically recognises when all vouchers have been used on limited agreements and will switch off the process. At this point, authors will no longer be offered open access under your agreement; they can publish via a subscription model in our hybrid journals or pay an APC to publish open access.