World’s first scientific publisher launches new open access journal

The Royal Society has today 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
• 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. 

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, said:

“Philosophical Transactions was the first journal dedicated to scientific endeavour and introduced the concepts of scientific priority and peer review. Today more than 20,000 scientific journals around the world are based on these two key principles and it is difficult to imagine a research process functioning without them. The publishing model is continually evolving and it’s important that the Royal Society’s own journal offerings do so too.  We are delighted to be publishing this exciting new journal. We hope the Royal Society Open Science demonstrates our continued support for open access publishing and a commitment to publishing research that benefits science and humanity.”