
Royal Society journals are free to access until Oct 27 - SQL2219
https://royalsociety.org/journals/
======
tokai
This is not open access. The Berlin declaration states it quite clearly. It is
about usage rights.[0]

Publishers really love co-opting the OA movement. Scheming up increasingly
convoluted colour OA categories. Or deluding the concept with campaigns like
this.

[0] [https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-
Declaration](https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration)

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codeulike
So they are doing 'Open Access Week', I tried to figure out why, and why this
week, which led to me this page [https://royalsociety.org/journals/free-
content/](https://royalsociety.org/journals/free-content/) and then to here:

[http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/about](http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/about)

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userbinator
The contents might already be on SciHub and other sites, but I can already see
the bandwidth spike they're going to receive from doing this... from those
sites wanting to complete their collection, among others.

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dddddaviddddd
Why not be open access always if it can be done for a week?

~~~
mhandley
The Royal Society is a non-profit organisation - the income is used mostly to
fund research, but also to fund scientific collaboration, and on public policy
to try and ensure governments are making decisions that are not completely
ignorant of the scientific evidence (of course they can then ignore that
evidence).

From the RS financial statements, the income from its publishing side raises
about £7.5m per year, and the publishing expenditure costs are about £3.5m per
year. So that's around £4m/year that is invested in science that otherwise
wouldn't be.

I think many RS fellows would like to see the RS journals become open access
all the time. But it would mean that less research could be funded.

Disclaimer: I'm a fellow, but I don't have any insight into future plans on
this front.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Put all the back catalogue of research into a zip file and throw it out there
via bit torrent.

Let the downloaders become the sharing infrastructure.

~~~
mhandley
Much of the back catalogue is already available open access direct from the
Royal Society:

 _Most of our oldest content is now freely available, specifically, all papers
older than 70 years. In addition, papers published between 10 years ago and
either 12 months ago (biological sciences) or 24 months ago (physical
sciences) are freely available. For Biographical Memoirs all issues are now
freely available, apart from the most recent issue._

~~~
earenndil
That's odd. What about the papers published between 70 and 10 years ago?

~~~
londons_explore
Ancient organisations like the Royal Society have arcane rules and oddities.
This is likely one of them.

