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A few months ago, I told you that the Royal Society of London was planning to launch a new open access science journal this year. This online-only journal will publish high-quality peer-reviewed research from across the entire range of scientific endeavour.
Today, a major milestone in this project has been reached: Royal Society Open Science (RSOS) is now seeking submissions! This new online-only journal will cover life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer science, so all scientific contributions are welcome. Since RSOS will be a "gold" journal, authors will submit their work for peer review and will only pay a fee to publish their work after it has been accepted. The published paper will be archived by the journal and will be freely available to the public in perpetuity.
Open access is important because it is another step towards freely sharing all publicly-funded research with the public. It's also crucial to freelance science writers and journalists, science blog writers, students, independent scholars and amateur scientists because it provides access to a broader range of peer-reviewed science that might not otherwise be easily available. For working scientists, open access is important because their work is freely accessible to all their scientific peers anywhere in the world, so this expanded visibility increases the impact of their work.
As an added bonus, one of this journal's stated goals is to share research that is difficult to publish elsewhere -- particularly research that includes negative findings. This is a critical step towards reducing duplication of seemingly promising lines of research that ultimately are not fruitful.
RSOS's other features include:
- no restrictions on length, scope or impact
- objective peer-review
- optional open peer-review
- rapid publication
- article level metrics and encouragement of post-publication comments
- an Editorial Board consisting entirely of practising scientists
- the expertise of the Royal Society's Fellowship
- transfer and acceptance of articles and reviewers' reports from other Royal Society journals
- high standard of author service, high production values and maximum exposure for articles
- fully compliant with funder and institutional open access mandates
- author retention of copyright and liberal reuse rights via CC BY 4.0
As a reward to the early birds in the crowd, RSOS is currently waiving its article processing charges and publication fees.
RSOS is set to launch in September 2014. You are invited to submit your work online (here).
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