Sponsor’s viewpoint
Opening up the chemical sciences
Roheena Anandexplores how the Royal Society of Chemistry is navigating the transition to open access and open science
The pandemic has accelerated a shift towards open science, with greater acceptance and uptake around open access (OA) and open science (OS) methodology more widely. Publishers have opened up their content related to Covid, come together in Rapid Review initiatives and ensured efficient remote access. With this in mind, it’s a good time to reflect on our progress towards OA and OS in the chemical sciences and our role as society and publisher. One of our core charter objectives is to
disseminate knowledge that supports our mission as a learned society: to advance the chemical sciences. Researchers use the knowledge published and disseminated in journals to make advances that further progress the science – benefitting science itself, and society as a whole. Because OA widens the dissemination of that knowledge, it is fundamental to our mission. We want to accelerate the transition to OA, working with our community to build a sustainable open future that works for everyone. With the support of our partners in library
and information management, we have developed transformational models since 2012, when we launched our Gold4Gold pilot, providing institutions with vouchers for their authors to publish OA in our hybrid journals. In collaboration with our European library customers, this evolved into Read & Publish (R&P), allowing authors to continue to publish OA in any of our hybrid journals – now we have R&P agreements with institutions across the globe. In countries with R&P agreements, significant proportions (80 to 90 per cent) of articles are published OA in our hybrid journals, showing that authors value this easy route to OA publication in recognised titles. We have invested ourselves to ensure OA is open to all. We flipped our flagship high- impact journal, Chemical Science, to diamond/ platinum OA; so that it is free to read and free to publish in. And we flipped the largest journal in the chemical sciences, RSC Advances,
36 Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020/2021
to OA, with low article processing charges (APCs) to offer another inclusive OA venue. More recently, we’ve launched full OA journals to give authors high-quality full OA publication options, in addition to hybrid ones, to meet their funder mandates. Our new OA journals do not charge APCs for the first few years, to ensure that authors can publish in these journals without needing funds. OA has a significant role to play in the
greater good that can come from OS more broadly. OS means more transparency across the whole research lifecycle, leading to greater reproducibility and trust in science, and the integrity of the scientific record. For that reason, we have invested in
supporting OS services for the community. ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database of over 92 million chemical structures curated from hundreds of data
“We have invested ourselves to
ensure OA is open to all”
sources. We are also proud to work together with a number of other global chemical science societies (ACS, GDCh, CCS, CSJ) to support ChemRxiv, the dedicated preprint server for the chemical sciences, allowing researchers to disseminate their research as soon as possible ahead of peer review. Our recent OA journals also feature transparent peer review. Inclusivity and equitable publishing is
intrinsic to OS and we’ve led on several initiatives to support this. We carried out the first in-depth gender analysis of the publication process in our community. Our report scrutinised each stage, highlighted areas where biases existed, and committed
to action to address this. One of these commitments resulted in our framework for action in scientific publishing, which we shared with other publishers to effect change across the industry. This practical ‘go to’ reference guide maps out methods we will use to achieve change, and how targeted progression in inclusion and diversity can be quantified. We’ve also reviewed the ways we
reward and recognise modern scientific excellence, to adapt them for a new, more inclusive definition of excellence. Teamwork, leadership, professionalism and diversity are fundamental elements in 21st-century science, yet the majority of scientific awards overlook or underplay these vital qualities. Engagement with, and acceptance of, OA and OS is evolving in the global chemical sciences community, with variances across countries, career stage and sub-discipline. So as a learned society, we’re taking our community on that journey. We can show why OA is important for
knowledge dissemination: how it can benefit researchers’ work, enabling it to reach wider audiences, gather more downloads, views and citations, all of which contributes to impact. We can demonstrate that, whether OA or hybrid, our journals all conform to high editorial and quality standards. We can also make the complex OA
landscape as navigable for researchers as possible, and provide them simple options for publication. An example is our R&P workflow, where we automatically identify an author at an institution with an agreement, and highlight that they can publish their article OA in a certain journal. And this isn’t the end… we’re committed
to increasing our OA and OS products and services, and continuing to evolve so that the route to OS is as seamless as possible. l
Roheena Anand is head of open access journals at the Royal Society of Chemistry
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