[GOAL] Re: Interesting Gold initiative by Royal Society of Chemistry

[Rzepa, Henry S]

On 23 Jul 2012, at 09:19, CHARLES OPPENHEIM wrote:

> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=420640#.UA0GGbst_KE.twitter states:
> The Royal Society of Chemistry is to waive its open-access publication fees for researchers from universities that subscribe to all its journals.Institutions that subscribe to the learned society’s “RSC Gold” collection will be given credit equal to the cost of their subscription, valid until the end of 2013. They will be able to use the credit to pay the society’s £1,600 open-access article fees for any paper whose corresponding author is affiliated to them.


This is not entirely what it seems.  My head of department tells me that the  RSC has given my department  "16 Gold Open access articles for free".  We published > 50 with the  RSC last year,  which means that >34 of our putative articles will continue to be charged  £1600.00.

We are now trying to come up with an equitable scheme for distributing these (I am bracing myself for eg having to write an  "impact statement"  in order to qualify for one of these). 

Still,  16 is better than none, which is what some other learned society publishers currently offer!