Royal Society of Chemistry - Open Access update

• The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) have just publicized on their blog that the leading journal Chemical Science is now Gold Open Access, which means readers can access it free of charge. The RSC has also waived the author Open Access publishing fees for two years, making it even easier for researchers' work to reach the world.
• The other journal titles in the RSC's portfolio, pubs.rsc.org/en/journals, are fully Gold, meaning all articles have a fee paid to be made Open Access, or are 'hybrid' subscription journals, where individual articles can be made Gold Open Access.  
• We still have Gold vouchers left which operate in lieu of paying an 'article processing charge' (APC) fee, so please ask us at openaccess@aston.ac.uk if you're submitting an article for publication, or have had one just accepted, and are interested in going Gold; more details of the scheme are here: "Gold for Gold".

RSC Going for Gold

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) have recently launched a “Going for Gold” scheme, where institutional subscribers to their journals packages are entitled to complimentary Open Access article credits.  In Aston’s case, this translates into 5 credits for Aston authors who wish to publish in RSC journals before the end of 2013.

The RSC publishes a broad range of journals, including many inter-disciplinary journals, so it is likely to have a wide relevance across SEAS and LHS.  Publication timescales can be very fast, particularly for the publication of communications articles.

One Aston author has already taken advantage of this initiative to make their 2012 article Open Access:

Lychnos, G., Amdouni, R., Davies, P. A. (2012). Concentrated seawater brines for use in solar-powered desiccant cooling cycles. RSC Advances, 2 (21), 7978–7982.

Allocation of credits will be administered by Georgina Hardy in Library & Information Services, so please contact her on g.c.hardy@aston.ac.uk for further information or to register your interest.

***Update: we have been advised by the RSC that we have 5 credits available (not 15 as originally thought)