Royal Society charges £300 per page for open access

The Royal Society is to charge authors £300 per page to use its new open access journal service.

EXiS Open Choice will offer authors whose work is accepted by Royal Society journals the opportunity to make their articles immediately available online. Initially authors will be charged a discounted rate of £225 per A4 page, but that will later be increased to £300.

Bob Ward, a spokesperson for the Royal Society, said that the fee represented the real cost of publishing online, because it included the cost of peer review. “Some open access providers have been subsidising the costs to authors. We don’t believe that’s a sustainable model in the long run,” he said.

Ward acknowledged that some researchers, such as those in the mathematical sciences, might find the costs too high, and said the Royal Society would be monitoring the takeup of the service in different disciplines, earlier this year the society warned against open access adoption.

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