Open Access News

The Royal Society today (21 June 2006) launched a trial of an 'open access' journal service, which will allow people to read new scientific papers free of charge immediately after they are published on the web. The new service offers authors the opportunity to pay a fee to have their paper made freely available on the web immediately if it is accepted for publication by any Royal Society journal. The first paper to be published under the new service appears on the Royal Society’s website today.

Currently, all papers appearing in Royal Society journals can be accessed free of charge on the Society’s website 12 months after the publication date....The new open access’ journal service, called EXiS Open Choice, is being tested by the Royal Society to see if it provides a viable way of sustaining the costs of peer review and other aspects of journal production. Authors who choose to pay to make their papers immediately available on the web will be charged a full cost of £300 per A4 page, although the Society will initially be offering a discounted rate of £225 per A4 page to encourage authors to use the service.

Professor Martin Taylor, Vice-President of the Royal Society, said: ..."There is still a lack of evidence about how open access journals can be sustained in the long-run, and we hope that this trial will help the Royal Society and researchers, as both authors and readers, to investigate one of the options."...

The EXiS Open Choice is being offered to authors of papers that are accepted for publication in any of the Royal Society’s seven journals.

Also see the FAQ on the new Open Choice policy. Among other things, it explains that "EXiS" stands for "Excellence in Science", that the RS will not waive the fee in cases of economic hardship, and that color charges will be laid on top of the OA fee.

Jon Boone has an article about the new policy, Royal Society tests new system of free access to papers, in yesterday's Financial Times. Excerpt:

The world’s oldest learned society will on Wednesday tear up its 340-year-old business model with the launch of an “open access” journal allowing people to read its new scientific papers free of charge. The Royal Society in London virtually invented the subscription-based system of peer-reviewed scientific journals when it started the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665. But in a trial that will be closely watched by researchers and journal publishers around the world, it will allow authors to pay for costs of publication themselves. Authors, or their research sponsors, who choose to pay to make their papers immediately available online will be charged £300 ($553, €439) per A4 page....

The open access movement has been helped by recent developments, including the decision by the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest research granting bodies, that all articles produced through work it has funded will have to be published on an open access basis from October. The Royal Society’s first paper published on Wednesday is being financed by the trust. Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, said he was delighted the society was making work freely available to all. “Maximum distribution of research findings is essential to maximise their impact,” Mr Walport said.

Comments. Three quick notes. More later.

1. This is a welcome and interesting move, for the same reasons that it was welcome and interesting when Elsevier adopted the hybrid model for some of its journals last month. Like Elsevier, the Royal Society has lobbied hard against public OA initiatives, like the draft RCUK OA policy, and has argued against the model of charging author-side fees. Like Elsevier, the Royal Society is trying the hybrid model for the right reasons --to see how well it works, to answer critics, and to measure the demand-- but its policy shares many of the same flaws. The RS will not waive its fees in case of economic hardship, will not apparently let authors choosing the new option retain copyright, and will not apparently deposit its OA articles in an OA repository to assure long-term OA in case the journals change their access policies in the future. Unlike most of the other publishers offering hybrid models, the RS is not yet offering to reduce the cost of subscriptions in proportion to author uptake.
2. Also like Elsevier, the RS is a green publisher who permits postprint archiving. It hasn't said how the Open Choice policy will interact with the self-archiving policy. If authors decline the new OA option (because they don't have a sponsor to pay the fee), will they still be allowed to self-archive their postprints without fee or delay? Or will the RS retreat on its green policy instead? (As far as I know, Elsevier hasn't clarified this yet either.)
3. The fee is high and we'll see what effect that has on the level of author uptake. As with Springer and Elsevier, who both charge $3,000 per paper, we cannot conclude that a low level of author uptake indicates a low level of author interest in OA. The Royal Society is the first publisher I know to charge a per-page processing fee rather than a per-article fee. This suggests that it will have greater uptake by authors of short papers than by authors of long papers, a variable independent of interest in OA or scientific merit.