Recently, Graham Anderson, Head of Publishing Operations at the Royal Society, shared his thoughts on the benefits of integrated infrastructure in helping to advance open science.
The Royal Society has a mission to support excellent science and has made a commitment to open access (OA) and open science (OS) as a means of maximizing the dissemination and reuse of research outputs. Can you briefly describe how your OA program has evolved over time?
Over the past 11 years, since the start of 2012, the proportion of our authors choosing to publish open access in our hybrid journals has continued to rise. In 2012 that proportion was ~11% and stood at ~60% at the end of 2022. Our portfolio contains two fully OA journals, Royal Society Open Biology and Royal Society Open Science.
Royal Society’s Transformative Agreements allow researchers to publish OA in any Royal Society journal with no APC fee at the point of use, and to date these agreements cover institutions in the following regions:
- United Kingdom
- Europe
- Middle East and Turkey
- Australia and New Zealand
- Africa
- North America
- Asia
Similar coverage exists for our OA Membership agreements, which allow researchers to publish open access in any Royal Society journal with a 25% discount on the article processing charge (APC).
Our mission is to recognise and support excellent science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity and the good of the planet. As the national academy of science for the UK, we support OA and OS as a means of maximising the dissemination and re-use of research outputs.
With growth comes complexity, and you have invested in shared infrastructure to drive efficiencies in your business and to provide a smoother transition for your authors and institutional partners. Can you share an example or two of how automation has helped improve your customer experience?
The Rightslink for Scientific Communications solution has allowed us to easily manage and process our various agreements at the point of acceptance. Authors associated with a Read & Publish deal are easily recognised using Ringgold matching logic, and the customizable touch-free auto-approval workflow removes barriers for the author and institution/funder leading to a smooth publication process. Our OA Membership deals are also automatically recognised and a discount for the author automatically applied.
In partnering with the OA Switchboard, we seek to be able to enhance the publication-level information we share with funders, institutions and authors. The goal being to provide a seamless OA publication journey for authors and more efficient reporting on research published under an OA fund, individually, or under an associated agreement for researchers and funders. A custom connector developed for the Royal Society to communicate with the OA Switchboard has been useful in meeting these aims. The connector ensures that publication-level financial settlement data, for example, APC amount or assignment to an associated Read & Publish deal are recorded in a structured format, combined with VoR publication metadata, and sent to institutions/funders at the point of publication for use in their own analysis and reporting. In 2022, RightsLink added a standard API that passes the authoritative transaction data into our custom Switchboard connector straight from the source.
In your experience, what do customers value most when managing OA publication data across publishers?
Timely access to robust and complete OA publication data at the point of publication is important for authors, institutions and funders to maintain accurate records as well as further analyses and reporting. Publishers often have formats and mechanisms to share information, and OA Switchboard and Rightslink for Scientific Communication can help to standardize and streamline this data.
Comprehensive and structured publication-level data that can easily be ingested and analysed is very important here to be able to accurately monitor and record research output and make decisions around return on investment in Transformative Agreements.
What’s ahead for the Royal Society and your customers on your OA journey?
We will continue to push for OA publishing while recognising the associated benefits while leveraging partnerships and technology advancements to improve the process for authors, funders and institutions.
Our four research journals, Proceedings A, Proceedings B, Biology Letters and Interface, are Transformative Journals and will move to a fully open access model when 75% of articles are being published open access.
As of 2021 our journals Biology Letters, Interface, Proceedings A and Proceedings B showed that open access papers received, on average, 29% more citations, 34% higher Altmetric scores and 60% more downloads.
We hope to see more institutions signing up to our Transformative Agreements as this will further increase our OA content and move us closer to flipping the four researcher journals. In keeping with our role as the UK’s national academy of science, we fund OA where there is a cost barrier for authors.
With this in mind we have launched our Royal Society Open Access Equity scheme that supports tens of thousands of eligible researchers in over 100 low and middle-income countries and territories with free access to our content and automatic waivers for all journals.