Building a sustainable open science journal | Publishing blog | Royal Society

"Royal Society Open Science has been very successful in its first three years. With rapidly growing submissions (now averaging over 100 per month) across the wide variety of subject areas covered by the journal and high levels of readership, it is now established in the research community. It was the first of our journals to introduce objective peer review, the first general science journal to publish the Registered Reports article type. It supports transparency in science by operating optional open peer review, has a strong data sharing policy and full suite of metrics at the article level.

In order to put the journal on a sustainable basis for the future and to support the Royal Society’s broader mission to bring high quality science to the widest possible audiencewe shall bring the introductory waiver period to an end (as we did with Open Biology in 2014). An APC of £900 will therefore apply to all accepted articles submitted to the journal after January 1 2018. This is in line with the mean figure of £1043 for ‘non-selective’ open access journals from the dataset used by JISC in their recent study of gold open access charges. As is the case for Open Biology, authors and institutions will be able to take advantage of our open access membership scheme and we will offer a waiver, upon request, for cases of financial hardship and for authors at institutions in developing countries."