World’s First Scientific Publisher Launches New Open Access Journal

From The Royal Society:

The Royal Society has announced the launch of Royal Society Open Science, a new open access journal publishing original research across the entire range of science on the basis of objective peer review.
Royal Society Open Science will be the first of the Royal Society’s journals to cover the entire range of science and mathematics. It will provide a scalable publishing service, allowing the Society to publish all the high quality work it receives without the restrictions on scope, length or impact imposed by traditional journals. The cascade model will allow the Royal Society to make more efficient use of the precious resource of peer review and reduce the duplication of effort in needlessly repeated reviews of the same article.
The journal will have a number of distinguishing features:

• objective peer review (publishing all articles which are scientifically sound, leaving any judgement of importance or potential impact to the reader)

• it will offer open peer review as an option

• articles will embody open data principles

• [our emphasis] each article will have a suite of article level metrics and encourage post-publication comments

• the Editorial team will consist entirely of practicing scientist and draw upon the expertise of the Royal Society’s Fellowship

• in addition to direct submissions, it will accept articles referred from other Royal Society journals

Royal Society Open Science welcomes the submission of all high quality science including articles which may usually be difficult to publish elsewhere, for example, those that include negative findings. The journal will launch officially in 2014 and will cover life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer science.
On March 6th 2015 the Royal Society will mark the 350th anniversary of the launch of Philosophical Transactions.

See Also: Royal Society Joins Open-Access Bandwagon (via Science News)

There are several open-access business models, but the Royal Society, like AAAS, has opted for “gold,” meaning that scientists pay for submission and then published papers are available to everyone for free straightaway. Some publishers of traditional journals—for which submission is free but readers must pay a subscription—have shied away from open-access journals because it was not clear whether they would be profitable. But an increasing number are now going down that route and some journals are making a profit.

See Also: AAAS Expanding the Science Family of Journals With a New Online-Only, Peer Reviewed, Open Access Publication (February 12, 2014)

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