The Royal Society publishes ten journals across the biological, physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences. Since the 1660s, the Royal Society’s fundamental purpose is to recognise, promote, and support excellence and development in science for the benefit of humanity.
The Royal Society has used the Corresponding Author data from 2021 and 2022 to calculate the average spend on APC over two years, used the 2024 Package S Tiered pricing for CAUL and used the average OA membership spend (where valid) for 2021 and 2022 for each CAUL member. Some APCs are discounted/waived and these have been accounted for the calculations.
Further information on this agreement is available from The Royal Society.
This page was last updated on 19 December 2024.
The following institutions participate in this agreement:
Authors who do not see their institution listed above should contact library staff to enquire further.
This agreement allows authors from participating institutions to publish in all of The Royal Society's hybrid and gold journals without the need for any transactional open access article processing charge (APC).
This is an uncapped agreement. There is no limit on the number of articles that can be published OA under this agreement.
Authors publishing open access with The Royal Society benefit from the same high-quality, rapid peer review and production as non-open access papers, for relevant journals, the article will be deposited into PubMedCentral, a liberal licensing and re-use policy through Creative Commons licence CC-BY 4.0, captured and recorded funding information on individual articles through CHORUS and FundRef, rapid publication and broad dissemination of high-quality research and review articles, full media promotion of articles, wide international readership, high levels of customer care for authors and readers, sophisticated searching, new issue alerting and keyword alerting facilities available, and Counter compliant article usage statistics available online for each article.
Articles accepted from 1/1/2025 are eligible to be published open access under this agreement.
Articles are eligible if they are accepted in the subscription period. For example, any article accepted between January 1st and December 31st of an active agreement with Royal Society Read and Publish will be eligible to be made Open Access. Articles that are accepted outside of an active subscription are not eligible.
The following article types are eligible for open access under this agreement:
As defined by the publisher, the eligible author is:
“Eligible Author” means an author who wants to publish Open Access Articles and is the submitting, corresponding author and is currently affiliated with one of the Institutions of the Transformative Agreement.
There is flexibility in circumstances whereby a corresponding author submits an article near the end of their tenure, but it's accepted after their departure. There is always a discussion with the author and the library before a final decision is made about the eligibility.
Responsible corresponding authors must include a participating institution as one of their affiliations to benefit from this agreement.
Authors will be identified as eligible for open access publishing by their:
Responsible corresponding authors must use their institutional email address when submitting an article for publication.
Responsible corresponding authors should not use personal email addresses (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail). Doing so may result in delayed approval of the article or the article may not be approved to be published open access under the terms of the agreement.
When authors submit, they need to answer questions about the article. One of the questions is whether you want to opt of Open Access, if they answer yes the system will check to see if they are eligible for Read & Publish or a discounted APC under an Open Access Membership. We work with Copyright Clearance Center to help us with this workflow. To ensure eligibility and that submissions are not missed or incorrectly invoiced, the Editorial staff cross check each submission against the Read & Publish customer list. Further information about this process is in the Open Access workflow section of this guide.
No other APC discounts are offered under this agreement.
The agreement allows for publishing in all journals. The complete title list is available online. If you wish to publish open access, please check to ensure that the journal is included on the list. Refer to the Royal Society website for more information about the journals.
Biographical Memoirs is the only journal not included in Read & Publish as this is an obituary work that is by editorial invitation only.
Hybrid journals that 'flip' to OA during the course of this agreement will remain available for OA publishing for the duration of the agreement.
Articles from authors at participating institutions may be published under the following Creative Commons licenses:
Authors retain all rights as per the CC license.
Further information about licenses is available on the publisher's website.
The Creative Commons licenses allow reuse (some with conditions) while protecting the authors' rights of acknowledgment as authors.
Article approvals are managed by the institutions via Rightslink.
The Royal Society does not charge additional fees for page and/or colour fees. Authors should always check each journal’s submission guidelines to ensure that they will not be subject to any other fees or charges.
Further details are available on the publisher’s website and from YouTube (Read and Publish with the Royal Society and Understanding the publishing process with the Royal Society)
Example screenshot(s):
Please email access@royalsociety.org for questions regarding this agreement. Please include your full name, institution, article title, journal name and DOI (if available), and state the reason for your enquiry.
Please contact library staff at your institution for questions related to this agreement. They can provide advice on using the CAUL Open Access Agreements.
