Open Access Membership for authors

If your institution has signed up to Royal Society Open Access Membership (check the list of members here), whenever you choose to publish open access research in any of the Royal Society journals, you will receive a 25% discount on article processing charges.

What is an Open Access Membership?

Our Open Access Membership helps institutions to support researchers who are mandated to publish their research using the open access model by subsidising APC fees.

Our open access policies are fully compliant with the requirements of a range of funders and fully support researchers who are funded by signatories to Plan S. The Royal Society journals are compliant with US federal public access policies under the 2022 OSTP ‘Nelson Memo’. We can publish work funded by the Wellcome Trust, HEFCE (REF 2020), NIH, HHMI, RCUK, the European Commission, MRC, NERC, STFC, ESRC, EPSRC, BBSRC and the National Science Foundation.

A full list of funders with open access requirements is available at SHERPA.

Benefits of open access publishing

Publishing open access will help you to find greater exposure for your research. Authors who choose open access publication are likely to benefit from increased dissemination and citation. Data from our Transformative Journal articles published in 2021 shows that open access papers received on average 29% more citations, 60% more downloads and 34% higher Altmetric scores than subscription articles.
 

Author support

We provide detailed author guidelines and checklists to help researchers prepare their article.

Our author journeys below highlight the simple steps from submission to publication for open access papers: 

• Download the author journey for our fully open access journals, Open Biology and Royal Society Open Science. 

• Download the author journey for our hybrid journals, Proceedings A, Proceedings B, Biology Letters, Interface and Notes and Records.

Helping to support early career researchers (ECRs) is vitally important for improving research culture and diversity, as well as training up the next generation of scientists. Our comprehensive ECR hub provides early career researchers, with the foundational knowledge of the publishing process and brings together resources to help them publish. 

Discover the benefits of publishing with the Royal Society. 

For any queries regarding your open access membership, please email our Open Access team at [email protected]