Royal Society launches new open access membership programmes to encourage open access in scholarly communication
The Royal Society has this week confirmed that it is at the leading edge of open access in scientific publishing by launching two innovative new open access membership programmes.
The programmes allow institutions to support open access for their researchers by giving them a discount of 25% when they publish open access articles in the Royal Society’s renowned international scientific journals.
The new membership programmes acknowledge the growth of open access publishing as well as the increasing number of open access articles being published by scientists in the Royal Society’s journals.
The two new membership programmes have aroused interest from UK and international scientific institutions with three key Institutions signing up already. The Excellence in Science Membership is relevant for institutions publishing across all areas of science and Open Biology Membership for those who wish to just support researchers in the biological sciences at the cellular and molecular level. Institutions are given a personalised webpage on the Royal Society publishing site, showcasing their research and linking through to the full text of the article.
Speaking of the new membership programmes, Chair of the Royal Society Publishing Board, Professor Mike Brady, FRS commented, “The Royal Society is delighted to play such an active role in the future of open access publishing with the launch of Open Biology and the two new institutional membership programmes. Open access is an established means of delivering important scientific information to researchers wishing to access and publish content that is freely and openly available on the web.”
The Royal Society is one of the most ‘open access’ friendly of the established science publishers and its journals cover the broad spectrum of science from biology, physics through to mathematics, engineering and multidisciplinary sciences.
In 2005, the Royal Society introduced its first open access publishing model EXIS Open Choice, allowing authors to make their articles open-access via the payment of an article-processing fee. Following this, the Royal Society recently launched its first completely full open access journal Open Biology, publishing original, high quality research in the field of cell and molecular biology. All papers are made freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution License permitting use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original work is cited.
NOTES FOR EDITORS
For further information contact:
Daisy Barton
Press and Public Relations
The Royal Society, London
Tel: 020 7451 2510
Email: daisy....@royalsociety.org
Phil Hurst
Publisher
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