Journal publishing is an almost entirely digital process and so is far less affected by the current Covid-19 situation than are many other sectors.
The rapidly evolving situation with covid-19 has, of course, caused widespread disruption to the many systems and processes of daily life. The Royal Society closed its London headquarters on 18 March and moved to homeworking for all staff. However, we want to reassure you that we are all working highly effectively from home and are keeping all aspects of our publishing operation going. Journal publishing is an almost entirely digital process and so is far less affected by this situation than are many other sectors.
Authors
All our journals are running normally with minimal interruption and so we encourage authors to continue to submit manuscripts as usual. Peer review may take a little longer under the current circumstances, but we will obviously do our utmost to keep any delays to a minimum.
Peer reviewers and Editorial Board members
The essential quality control process of peer review depends on the dedicated work of researchers around the globe. There are many competing priorities at the best of times, but in the present situation we understand that you may need more time and flexibility than usual. Please let us know of any specific problems you face and we will work with you to minimise delays.
Readers
It has come to our attention that a number of researchers are having problems accessing our content via institutional logins due to the increased load on IT systems caused by everyone working from home, or by problems with CASA and device pairing at their institution. We have therefore decided to make all our content freely available until further notice.
Librarians
Our customer services team are working as normal and can be contacted by email, or you can raise issues through your local representative.
Open access content
A large amount of our journal content is published with immediate open access under CC-BY licence. In addition, we have made any articles relevant to covid-19 immediately open access in a special collection.
Finally, this is not the first epidemic Royal Society journals have survived.
This is a very challenging and uncertain time for everyone and we want to wish you and your families all the best as we get through this situation together. Please contact us with any other queries you might have.
