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RSS feedsThe 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.
“We’ve always been sympathetic to the aims of open access in making opportunities for researchers to share their work,” said Bob Ward, a spokesperson for the Royal Society, adding 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.”
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 take-up of the service in different disciplines.
“One of the things we want to examine is whether introducing a fee creates a disincentive,” he said.
The move was welcomed by Sally Morris , chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), who said that the charge was comparable to that being made by other publishers. Morris said that 20% of publishers were now experimenting with open access, and that ALPSP would be watching the results of the Royal Society’s trial with interest.
The Royal Society was embroiled in an open access spat earlier this year when its president Lord Martin Rees claimed that if the Research Councils UK (RCUK) adopted a pro open access stance, it could damage scientific research.
“Funders may be forcing scientific researchers to change the way they publish papers so quickly that disastrous consequences could result,” the society said in a position statement regarding RCUK policy . The statement added that peer review journals could be forced to close. “The worst case scenario is the introduction of new journals, archives and IRs that cannot be sustained in the long term.”
Over 40 fellows of the society wrote an open letter demanding Rees withdraw the statement.
