Open access publishing

Royal Society Publishing supports open access and open science as a means of maximising the dissemination and re-use of research outputs.

• What is open access?
• Open access at Royal Society Publishing
• Benefits of publishing open access
• Compliance with funder open access policies
• Article processing charges (APCs) and what they cover
• Read & Publish
• Open Access Membership
• Waivers
• Royal Society Research Fellows
• Retrospective open access
• OA licence

What is open access?

Open access refers to the open, available publication of research papers so that anyone can access and re-use them. Traditionally, published research outputs were only available to those who could gain access to them via a library or individual subscription. Open access articles, denoted by an open padlock symbol, may be accessed by anyone free of charge. Open licences facilitate the re-use of research outputs to maximise impact and discovery. By opening up research to everyone, open access widens access to research, facilitates engagement, collaboration and understanding.

Open access is part of the wider concept of open science which seeks to open up the entire research and publication process even further, including open data, open protocols, open code and transparent peer review.

Open access at Royal Society Publishing

Royal Society Publishing is a member of OASPA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

Two of our journals, Royal Society Open Science and Open Biology, are fully open access and we provide authors with the choice of open access in all of our hybrid journals.

Our four hybrid research journals, Proceedings A, Proceedings B, Biology Letters and Interface, are moving to a fully open access model when 75% of articles are being published open access. We report their progress here.

From 2022, the following article types are published open access (previously they were ‘free to access’):

• Editorials (all journals)
• Introductory articles and prefaces (Philosophical Transactions A and B, Interface Focus)
• Dedications (Philosophical Transactions A and B)
• Comments and replies
• Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern (all journals)

Benefits of publishing open access

We apply exactly the same standards of high-quality, rapid peer review and production to all papers, whether they are available under open access or subscription only.

Authors who choose open access publication are likely to benefit from increased dissemination and citation. Data from our hybrid research articles published in 2022 shows that open access papers received on average 100% more citations and 116% more downloads than subscription articles. Of all articles published in 2022, 99 of the top 100 articles by Altmetric score were open access.

If you choose open access, for relevant journals, we will deposit the article in PubMed Central and ResearchGate on your behalf.

You’ll also benefit from a liberal licensing and re-use policy. Our open access articles are published with a CC-BY Creative Commons licence which permits free re-use by anyone without the need to ask permission, provided that they cite the original source of the article.

Compliance with funder open access policies

Royal Society journals are compliant with all funders open access policies including cOAlition S, Wellcome Trust, ERC, HHMI, Horizon Europe, UKRI, NSF, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Australia Research Council. They are compliant with US federal public access policies under the 2022 OSTP ‘Nelson Memo’. For a full list of funders with open access requirements, please visit the SHERPA/JULIET website. 

Plan S funded authors
An article can be compliant in the following ways:

1. Published in an open access journal (Open Biology or Royal Society Open Science)
2. Published via a transformative agreement which means that the corresponding author who is covered by such agreements can publish open access without payment of an article processing charge (all Royal Society journals)

Authors may deposit a preprint of their article in a repository at any time.

Article processing charges (APCs)

Submission of an open access article is free, but if it is accepted for publication, authors are asked to pay a fee to have their article made open access immediately upon publication, unless the corresponding author belongs to an institution signed up to one of our Read & Publish agreements or qualifies for a waiver. The charges are:

Our APC pricing reflects the service the journals deliver to the research community and covers integrity checks, management of peer review, online hosting, promotion, author support, our many open science and reproducibility initiatives and ongoing investment in technology. Any surplus generated is used to further the Society’s mission objectives.

Please note that the article will not be published as open access until payment is received. If payment is delayed the article will retrospectively be made open access. VAT may be applicable for these services. Even if your institution is not in a Read & Publish agreement with us, your institution or research funder may still reimburse your open access charges (check with your research office).

We are committed to transparent pricing to ensure that, for open access articles, we do not receive both an article processing charge and subscription income.

Read & Publish

We launched Royal Society Read & Publish in January 2021 as part of our developing open access journey. If you are the corresponding author from an institution signed up to one of our Read & Publish agreements*, all open access fees and invoices are automatically covered by your library. To read more about Royal Society Read & Publish, please download our PDF flyer and visit our Read & Publish for authors or Read & Publish for librarians pages.

*To ensure you are not charged a fee, please ensure you select the required version of your institutional affiliation when submitting an article.

Open Access Membership

Researchers at institutions signed up to our Open Access Membership scheme can save 25% on article processing charges (APCs). To read more, visit our Open Access Membership for authors or Open Access Membership for librarians pages. 

Waivers

If your institution is not signed up to a Read & Publish agreement or our Open Access Membership scheme, you may be eligible for an APC waiver.

Our Royal Society Open Access Equity scheme supports tens of thousands of eligible researchers in over 100 low- and middle-income countries and territories by providing free access to journal articles and automatic APC waivers in all Royal Society journals.

For journals where open access publication is the only option, we provide a generous waiver policy that includes discretionary waivers for those who lack funds (see Open Biology and Royal Society Open Science). The same waiver policies will apply to our hybrid journals when they flip to full open access.

Royal Society Research Fellows

The Society’s journals no longer automatically waive APCs for Royal Society Research Fellows for open access publication. This applies to all new submissions from 1 March 2023. 

If you are submitting an article type that may be subject to an APC, the main options for publishing open access from this date are: 

1. Where your institution has signed a Read and Publish agreement, which will cover the APC without cost to you.
2. Some of our grant holders* are permitted to use research costs to cover article processing charges associated with publication in open access journals. Please refer to the Research publication section on the Grants Policies and Positions page. Where schemes do not use the Grant Funding Guidance, publication cost eligibility will be stated in scheme notes or separate costings guidance.
3. Meeting the APC cost from other sources such as the Wellcome Trust or institutional open access funds.

We will waive the APC for submissions before 1 March 2023 where (1) does not apply.

*University Research Fellows, Dorothy Hodgkin Fellows, Newton International Fellows, Research Professorships, Career Development Fellowships

Retrospective open access

We offer authors the option for an article previously published on a subscription basis to be converted to open access. On payment of the current APC, the article is made available under our open access licence - we will take into account previous page charges for the article and reduce the APC accordingly. If you are interested, please contact the journal where the article was published, quoting the article DOI or title.