The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced an experimental program for 2013 that will provide vouchers to authors, allowing them to publish their RSC articles open access without paying the standard article publication fee.
The program, called “Gold for Gold,” is offered at universities, like MIT, whose libraries subscribe to “RSC Gold,” the entire package of RSC journals and databases.
All MIT authors publishing in RSC journals are eligible. A limited number of vouchers (based on the cost to the MIT Libraries for the RSC Gold subscription) will be distributed by the Libraries on a first-come, first-served basis. Vouchers can be applied only to articles that have been accepted for publication, and cannot be applied retrospectively to articles already published.
To request a voucher, send an email request to rscvouchers@mit.edu, including:
- Your name
- The title of your article
- The RSC journal the article has been accepted by
If vouchers are still available, a voucher number will be sent back to you by the Libraries via email.
To use a voucher, it should be entered into the Gold for Gold online acceptance form after the author receives notification that the article has been accepted. (The author will be asked to sign a different publication agreement at this stage.)
Benefits of vouchers
Upon publication, the article will be accessible to all readers, worldwide, regardless of whether they or their institutions subscribe to RSC journals. The Gold for Gold open access articles will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, maximizing the potential for openness and reuse.
RSC explains that they envisioned the program as “a mechanism to ease some of the economic burden on our authors who either needed to comply with open access mandates or simply wanted their articles published open access for other reasons.” Choosing the RSC open access option is one way to fulfill the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy, with no action required by the author other than indicating the article is NIH funded.
For more information, or to provide feedback about this pilot program:
Gold for Gold FAQ
Erja Kajosalo, Chemistry & Chemical Engineering Librarian
