fash-biz-digest

The Royal Society and academic publishing



The internet opened another world for the academic community and some of the efforts in online publishing are:

-the federal research public access act covering the accessibility of U.S based research materials online.
-the initiatives of the European Commission
-and a project by the UK-based Royal Society to share the cost of publishing with researchers.

Thus making information industry observers to wonder whether this inititative of the royal society is a new dimension in open-source or a transformational shift in the work of the association that has been promoting science and supporting engineering and technology in the UK.

On the web site of the Royal Society http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk the publishing guidelines and papers relevant to the new publishing model are available for consultation. This is a strategy that we need to watch closely.