“UK institutes who are RSC Gold
customers will shortly receive credit equal to the subscription paid, enabling
their researchers, who are being asked to publish Open Access but often do not
yet have funding to pay for it directly, to make their paper available via Open
Science, the RSC's Gold OA option.”
This follows a series of events that are reshaping the way
research outputs are published. Over the last month there has been a flood of
announcements about making publicly funded research outputs available to anyone
for free (open access). The UK Government has backed a transition to open
access, with the release of the report of the Working Group on Expanding Access
to Published Research Findings (Finch report) which
stated:
“The principle that the results
of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the
public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable.”
On 28 June The Wellcome Trust announced
that it will be re-enforcing its open access mandate, with sanctions for
institutions on non-compliance including future grant payments being withheld.
Earlier this week RCUK announced a new policy on open access to research outputs, significantly
strengthening the existing requirements for grant holders to ensure their
peer-reviewed articles are freely available to all, and the following day the
European Commission released a similar message:
“Scientific data: open access to
research results will boost Europe's innovation capacity” (EU
press release)
The new RCUK and EU policies continue to allow articles to
be accessible either:
- Directly by the publisher (usually through payment of a fee), known as ‘Gold’ open access; or
- Through deposit of an author version in an open access repository (often after a limited embargo period) known as ‘Green’ open access.
There is much debate about how these changes will be managed, funded and resourced. In the meantime, this is an interesting and positive commitment from RSC to help researchers benefit from open access publishing and meet their funders’ requirements.
