RSC Advances is now gold open access

Welcome to the first gold open access issue of RSC Advances. This issue showcases new research from across the breadth of the chemical sciences and from around the world, available to all those who need it.

Just over six months have passed since the Royal Society of Chemistry's Deputy Chief Executive, Dr Helen Pain, announced the conversion of RSC Advances to a gold open access journal at the Chinese Chemical Society Congress in Dalian on 1 July 2016.

By converting RSC Advances to open access, the Royal Society of Chemistry aims to shape the future of open access publishing and maximise the visibility of research in the chemical sciences and related areas. We want to disseminate the best quality research to the largest audience possible, to the benefit of the global scientific community. This means that open access publishing needs to be available to everyone, regardless of their economic background. We also recognise that many funding bodies and institutions also now require authors to publish in an open access journal, and this change will give authors an affordable option for doing so.

We have set our article processing charge (APC) at an industry competitive level of £750. For the first two years authors will pay a discounted APC of £500. There is a further discount to £250 being made available to five countries – Egypt, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines. We are also guaranteeing a full waiver to the APC to more than 40 countries in the developing world, in line with the Research4Life programme.

We offer authors industry standard Creative Commons licensing, CC-BY or CC-BY-NC, at no additional cost. These licences have more flexible terms for re-use and distribution of a work than our standard licence to publish, enabling our authors to fulfil funding body requirements. Copyright is also retained by authors (or their employers) when an open access licence is accepted.

As an open access journal, the quality standards of RSC Advances, that you our authors and readers have come to expect from us, will not change.¹ We have a high rejection rate and a five-year impact factor of 3.5 (Data based on 2015 Journal Citation Reports® Thomson Reuters, June 2016). We are maintaining our strict acceptance criteria, publishing only high quality, well-conducted research that significantly advances the development of the field. These strict criteria are controlled by our international team of associate editors and reviewer panel members, who are experts in their respective fields, and cover all areas of the chemical sciences.

The vision of RSC Advances is to provide a high quality society publishing option for all sections of the chemical sciences community and its ethos was to be innovative and inclusive, providing high levels of customer service and support during the entire publication process. We also want to continue to encourage new authors to publish with the Royal Society of Chemistry, with a particular focus on early career researchers.² We believe the excellent, high quality research published in RSC Advances will reach an even wider global audience, tackling economic barriers and bringing together a world-wide chemistry community.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our authors for their continuing support of RSC Advances. I would also like to thank all our Associate Editors, reviewer panel members and Editorial Board members for their support over the last few months as RSC Advances makes this significant change.

I hope you will enjoy reading the exciting new research in this issue of RSC Advances and will consider submitting some of your future research to the journal. I welcome any comments you have about the journal and invite you to contact us at E-mail: advances-rsc@rsc.org. I wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2017.

Andrew Shore

Executive Editor, Royal Society of Chemistry.

References

1. RSC Adv., 2016, 6, 90718.
2. RSC Adv., 2011, 1,13.

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