RSC initiative aims to ease OA transition

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The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced an initiative to support British researchers in the transition to gold open access (OA).

The ‘Gold for Gold’ experiment will provide UK institutes that subscribe to the RSC Gold collection of journals, databases and magazines with credit equal to the subscription paid. This credit will be used to enable researchers at the institutions to make their papers available via Open Science, the publisher's gold OA option.

Nearly 50 UK institutes subscribe to RSC Gold. RSC anticipates that the new initiative will equate to the RSC donating more than £1 million pounds worth of article-processing fees to the UK research community by the end of the year.

This move follows the announcement from the UK government supporting migration towards gold OA for publicly-funded scientific research and the revision of the Research Councils UK's OA policy in favour of publishing in OA-compliant journals. ‘Gold for Gold’ aims to support researchers until the block grants from RCUK are distributed next April.

The ‘Gold for Gold’ scheme is currently a pilot for the UK only but if it proves beneficial to the community RSC says that it will consider rolling out the initiative to the rest of the world.