AAAS announces open-access journal : Nature News Blog

"The publisher of the august journal Science is to launch its first open-access journal in early 2015. The nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced the new online-only broad-discipline journal, to be called Science Advances, today ahead of the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago. 'Science Advances would aspire to uphold editorial standards on a par with journals such as Nature Communications or PNAS [not open-access], in terms of the quality of papers,' says Marcia McNutt, the editor-in-chief of Science. That distinction suggests that the AAAS intends to place a quality bar on papers being published in its new journal, and that it will not adopt the lucrative model of open-access journals which publish any papers that peer reviewers deem scientifically sound. The journal will be funded by upfront fees paid per article — a common open-access business model — which AAAS executive publisher and CEO Alan Leshner says would be 'within industry norms and competitive with similar journals.' (Nature Communications charges between US$4800-$5200 for publication). It will also, as Leshner and McNutt explain in an editorial published today in Science, be staffed by researchers, rather than a separate team of professional editors. Science Advances will enter a very crowded, and fast-growing, open-access publishing market. Almost every major publisher and society now has a thriving open-access business — helped along by national and institutional mandates to publish open-access research, and by the squeeze on library subscription budgets which has meant that new subscription journals find it hard to break into the market ..."