The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, which is the German national library for science and technology, have signed a new open access ‘Platinum model’ agreement. The four-year deal provides unlimited RSC publishing services – including submission, peer-review, hosting, indexing and promotion – to authors and readers at 77 German research institutions without charge.
All academic and research institutions can participate in this new consortium model, including those that do not publish. Furthermore, under a renewal of the agreement that will begin in 2028, all content will be fully open access (OA) and authors from participating institutions can publish without author charges.
The fact that 77 institutions have signed on to this new RSC Platinum consortium model means that the vast majority of the publications in RSC journals from German institutions will be OA. This represents a significant upgrade over the RSC’s previous Read & Publish consortium with TIB, which covered just 31 German institutions and approximately 45% of research articles from Germany.
‘We hope that the success of this collaborative model in Germany will serve as a template by which we can develop similar models in other countries to ensure the costs of publication in an OA world are distributed across relevant stakeholders and not the sole responsibility of research-intensive institutions – or individual authors,’ stated Sara Bosshart, the RSC’s head of open access.
Irina Sens, TIB’s deputy director and head of library operations, said that over the next four years the new agreement will help all parties to transition from ‘the current hybrid model’ to a fully OA model. ‘With the entire portfolio covered for the first time, this deal also allows authors to choose their RSC publication venue irrespective of financial considerations,’ she added.
