Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

Interesting: RAS Open Access Publishing Consultation

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    I got an email from Professor Mike Cruise, President, Royal Astronomical Society, requesting that I "take part in an online consultation by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) on open access publishing in astronomy and astrophysics" in the form of an online questionnaire.

    Why did I get such an email? Because I am a co-author of a paper published in MNRAS!

    Quite a few of the questions seemed completely irrelevant to me, a mere citizen scientist. One intrigued me: in effect, it asked who paid the access charges for the published paper(s), in order for it/them to be immediately open access. As far as I know, there were no such charges, per an RAS policy to make all Zooniverse papers immediately open access. Does anyone know what the "behind the scenes" story is?

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Hi Jean,
    We had a very old "grandfathered" agreement between MNRAS and the Galaxy Zoo team that our papers will be free to access so that our volunteers will be able to access them without a problem. But I have learnt recently that there are now different levels of "reading without paying" . As such, we are under the "free to view" service, which is different from Open Access publication. "Free to view" publication makes these articles freely available to all but with the same restrictions on reuse as with the standard MNRAS licence.

    Hope that this is helpful,
    Ivy

    Posted