p2p news / p2pnet: Britain’s Royal Society in London virtually invented the subscription-based system of peer-reviewed scientific journals when it started the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665, says the Financial Times.

Now the world’s oldest learned society will, "tear up its 340-year-old business model with the launch of an ‘open access’ journal allowing people to read its new scientific papers free of charge," says the story.

"But in a trial that will be closely watched by researchers and journal publishers around the world, it will allow authors to pay for costs of publication themselves."

Authors, or their research sponsors, who choose to pay to make their papers immediately available online will be charged £300 ($553, €439) per A4 page, says the FT, quoting Royal Society vp professor Martin Taylor as saying the society is committed to finding better ways for researchers to exchange knowledge.

""There is still a lack of evidence about how open access journals can be sustained in the long run, and we hope that this trial will help the Royal Society and researchers, as both authors and readers, to investigate one of the options," he says.

A report by the European Commission has called for research paid for by member states to be made freely available, says the story, adding:

"Researchers who receive EU funding should be mandated to deposit electronic versions of articles published in subscription journals on web archives accessible to all, it said. Three US senators have proposed the Federal Research Public Access Act that would oblige federal departments that invest more than $100m in research to insist articles are put online within six months of publication in a subscription journal. The Association of American Publishers, however, argued learned societies need to be able to make profits on publishing to survive."

Digg this story.

Also See:
Financial Times - Royal Society tests free access to papers, June 21, 2006

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