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Entrance to the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace, London.Image: Tom Morris, 7 June 2011 (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)
The world's oldest scientific publisher, The Royal Society of London, announced today that they will introduce a new open access peer-reviewed journal that will publish research from across the entire spectrum of science and mathematics. The journal, which is set to launch sometime in autumn 2014, will be known as Royal Society Open Science.
Royal Society Open Science (RSOS) will be the first in the Royal Society's family of journals that will publish research in all the sciences -- life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer science. RSOS will publish all high quality work received without conventional restrictions on scope, length or impact that are commonly imposed by traditional journals. Additionally, RSOS will welcome research article submissions that may be difficult to publish elsewhere, for example, reports that include negative findings.
Furthermore, RSOS will be the Royal Society's first journal that leaves the reader to form her own assessments regarding the importance or potential impact of the published research, an unusual system known as "objective peer review". To ensure that all published papers that are scientifically sound, the editorial team is comprised solely of working scientists, and will rely upon the expertise of the society's approximately 1400 fellows, along with direct submissions and referrals from its sister journals -- a system known as cascading peer review, which is designed to increase efficiency and to speed the scientific publishing process.
RSOS will also:
- offer the option to disclose identities of those who reviewed each paper, a transparent practice known as open peer review
- ensure that all data appearing in published papers will be freely and publicly available on the internet
- provide individual metrics for each paper and post-publication comments will be encouraged -- hey, just like individual blog essays!
"We are delighted to be publishing this exciting new journal", said Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, in a press release.
All articles published by RSOS will be open access. Unlike most journals, which charge exorbitant fees to purchase a single paper, open access (OA) journals make their published research articles freely accessible to the public. The OA movement, which first stirred in 1966, gained momentum as the internet developed and then exploded in 2006 (timeline). Even the American Society for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes one of the world's top-ranked journals, SCIENCE, recently announced plans to launch their own OA journal, Science Advances.
The OA movement has spawned several OA business models. The Royal Society has chosen to use the "gold" access model, where authors pay a fee to submit their work for peer review and then the journal archives the published papers, which are made freely available to the public.
"The publishing model is continually evolving and it's important that the Royal Society's own journal offerings do so too", said Sir Paul in a press release.
When it launches, RSOS will become the Royal Society's second gold access journal -- their first being Open Biology, which publishes original, high quality research in the fields of cell and molecular biology.
The Royal Society has influenced scientific publishing from its inception. The 350th anniversary of scientific publishing will be observed on 6 March 2015, which is when the Royal Society officially launched the world's first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions.
"Philosophical Transactions was the first journal dedicated to scientific endeavour and introduced the concepts of scientific priority and peer review", said Sir Paul.
Scientific priority is the idea that credit is given to the individual or group of individuals whose work advances knowledge, who first propose a theory or who first made a particular discovery. Peer review, which is a more familiar concept to most of us, is where one or more researchers in the same field -- scientific peers -- evaluate the scientific soundness of a piece of research prior to publication.
"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", explained Sir Paul.
"We hope [that] Royal Society Open Science demonstrates our continued support for open access publishing and a commitment to publishing research that benefits science and humanity."
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