Chemical Science will follow gold open access model from January 2015 and waive author fees for two years

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced that it will make its flagship journal Chemical Science free to access from the start of 2015. Chemical Science will be a gold open access journal, and operate in a similar way to other gold open access journals run by publishing houses such as the Public Library of Science or BioMed Central, charging authors a fee to have their manuscripts published – once they have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication.

Chemical Science will be free to access from January 2015, and author fees for publishing in the journal will be suspended until 2017. The outgoing UK science minister, David Willetts, applauded the move as a ‘bold step’, adding that the country was leading the way in giving publicly-funded research the widest possible audience.

Dominic Tildesley, president of the RSC, said: ‘I am delighted that my first public announcement since assuming the presidency of the Royal Society of Chemistry just last week is a momentous step forward in sharing chemical science knowledge worldwide. The Royal Society of Chemistry fully supports sustainable open access publishing, as indeed do I.’

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