Research Publishing & Impact: Royal Society

This 2025 agreement allows authors from participating institutions to publish in hybrid and Gold Royal Society journals without the need for any transactional open access article processing charge (APC).

This is an uncapped agreement. There is no limit on the number of articles that can be published OA under this agreement.

Check the 2025 Otago OA Publishing Agreement Titles List (updated 3 March 2025) for your desired journal.

Article eligibility

Articles accepted from 1/1/2025 are eligible to be published open access under this agreement.

Articles are eligible if they are accepted in the subscription period.  For example, any article accepted between January 1st and December 31st of an active agreement with Royal Society Read and Publish will be eligible to be made Open Access.  Articles that are accepted outside of an active subscription are not eligible.

Article types

The following article types are eligible for open access under this agreement:

• Original Research
• Reviews
• Opinion Pieces
• Perspectives
• Comments
• Editorials
• Corrections, retractions, expression of Concern
• Reports
• Methods and Techniques
• Open questions
• Short Communications
• Evidence Synthesis
• Biological Science Practice

Note: Obituaries are by invitation. They are not included in this Read and Publish Agreement in this journal: Biographical Memoirs.

Other charges

The Royal Society does not charge additional fees for page and/or colour fees. Authors should always check each journal’s submission guidelines to ensure that they will not be subject to any other fees or charges.

Author eligibility

As defined by the publisher, the eligible author is:

“Eligible Author” means an author who wants to publish Open Access Articles and is the submitting, corresponding author and is currently affiliated with one of the Institutions of the Transformative Agreement.

There is flexibility in circumstances whereby a corresponding author submits an article near the end of their tenure, but it's accepted after their departure.  There is always a discussion with the author and the library before a final decision is made about the eligibility.

Responsible corresponding authors must include a participating institution as one of their affiliations to benefit from this agreement. 

Authors will be identified as eligible for open access publishing by their:

• institutional affiliation
• email address

Responsible corresponding authors must use their @otago.ac.nz email address when submitting an article for publication. 

Responsible corresponding authors should not use personal email addresses (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail). Doing so may result in delayed approval of the article or the article may not be approved to be published open access under the terms of the agreement. 

When authors submit, they need to answer questions about the article.  One of the questions is whether you want to opt of Open Access, if they answer yes the system will check to see if they are eligible for Read & Publish or a discounted APC under an Open Access Membership. We work with Copyright Clearance Center to help us with this workflow.  To ensure eligibility and that submissions are not missed or incorrectly invoiced, the Editorial staff cross check each submission against the Read & Publish customer list.  Further information about this process is in the Open Access workflow section of this guide.

Author rights

Articles from authors at participating institutions may be published under the following Creative Commons licenses:

• CC BY

Authors retain all rights as per the CC license.

Further information about licenses is available on the publisher's website.

The Creative Commons licenses allow reuse (some with conditions) while protecting the authors' rights of acknowledgment as authors. 

How to submit your article for open access publishing

The following instructions for authors have been provided by the publisher.

Regular submission and peer review processes apply.

1. Select the Brill journal of your choice here: https://brill.com/browse?et=journal&level=all&pageSize=10&sort=datedescending

2. Submit your article via Editorial Manager. During the submission process, select YES under "Open Access".

3. You will be referred to Brill's Open Access payment environment. Please provide your affiliation to claim 100% discount to the Open Access publication charge.

4. Your article will be peer reviewed. 

5. Upon acceptance of your article, it is flagged for Open Access publishing. You will receive the Open Access license for review.

6. Your article is published in Open Access with a CC-BY license.  

How to submit your article for open access publishing

Further details are available on the publisher’s website and from YouTube (Read and Publish with the Royal Society and Understanding the publishing process with the Royal Society)

Example screenshot(s):

• Author Journey Hybrid Journals (pdf)

• Author Journey Open Journals (pdf)

Archiving in institutional repositories

Authors may deposit articles in institutional repositories:

• Preprints, such as drafts at pre-peer review stage, may be deposited in institutional repositories at any point during the publication process.
• Author accepted manuscripts, at post-peer review stage, may be made available via institutional repositories immediately after publication with no embargo period.

View the publisher’s self-archiving rights policy for further information.

Contact details: The Royal Society

Please email access@royalsociety.org for questions regarding this agreement. Please include your full name, institution, article title, journal name and DOI (if available), and state the reason for your enquiry.

Archiving in institutional repositories

Authors may deposit articles in institutional repositories:

• Preprints, such as drafts at pre-peer review stage, may be deposited in institutional repositories at any point during the publication process.
• Author accepted manuscripts, at post-peer review stage, may be made available via institutional repositories immediately after publication with no embargo period.

View the publisher’s self-archiving rights policy for further information.