About Royal Society Open Science

Aims and scope

Royal Society Open Science is an open journal publishing high-quality original research on the basis of objective peer-review.

The journal covers the entire range of science and mathematics and allows the Society to publish all the high-quality work it receives without the usual restrictions on scope, length or impact. Demonstrating its commitment to best practice in open access publishing, Royal Society Open Science has been awarded the DOAJ Seal.

The journal has a number of distinguishing features:

• objective peer-review (publishing all articles which are scientifically sound and useful to the community)
• makes the reviewer reports, decision letter and associated author responses accessible alongside published articles, with referees having the option to sign their reports
• articles embody open data principles
• each article has a suite of article level metrics and we encourage post-publication comments
• the Editorial team consists entirely of practising scientists and draws upon the expertise of the Royal Society’s Fellowship
• in addition to direct submissions, it accepts for consideration articles referred from other Royal Society journals, as well as via a collaboration with the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Royal Society Open Science welcomes the submission of all high-quality science including articles which may usually be difficult to publish elsewhere, for example, replications or those that include negative findings. The journal covers life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer science. Find out more about the scope of subject areas considered by the journal. Unfortunately, work that has a strong clinical focus, including but not limited to clinical psychology, will not be considered for publication, and any exceptions will be at the sole discretion of the Editor.

Journal Diversity Statement : The Royal Society’s journals aim to foster inclusive science and scholarship that reflects the disciplinary, geographic and human diversity of the community. Submissions are encouraged and welcomed from all authors, regardless of their characteristics, protected or otherwise. We are committed to equal opportunity and work diligently to mitigate bias in our editorial review processes. We continually work toward identifying and implementing good practices for scientific publishing. Endorsed by journal Editor-in-Chief Wendy Hall.

For more information on selection criteria, article types and submitting your article please visit the information for authors page.

Article types

Royal Society Open Science publishes research articles, reviews , perspectives, Registered Reports , replications , evidence synthesis and comment and invited reply.

Editorial board

Royal Society Open Science has an international Editorial Board with expertise across the life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer sciences. See who is currently on the board.

Open access

All papers are made freely available under an open access model immediately on publication at the Royal Society Open Science website and are deposited in PubMed Central on behalf of the author. Under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), authors retain copyright for their article but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles provided the original authors and source are cited.

Article processing charges

Please see our article processing charges FAQs for current information on charges.

Transparent peer review

Royal Society Open Science operates open peer review for all manuscripts, making the review process as transparent as possible. This is achieved by making the reviewer reports, decision letter and associated author responses accessible alongside published articles. The journal strictly maintains referee anonymity, so although we do encourage reviewers to sign their reports, this will be voluntary. Authors do have recourse to opt out of open peer review only if sufficient reason is provided to the handling editors. Referee reports are made public under an open access licence (CC-BY).

Please note that it is not permitted to publish reviewer reports, decision letters and author responses for rejected papers.

Publishing format

Royal Society Open Science is published online only. Along with all Royal Society journals, we are committed to electronic archiving and providing perpetual access.

There are no length restrictions on submissions to Royal Society Open Science though we ask that submissions are as succinct as possible. There is the facility for including Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM). There are also no charges for colour figures in Royal Society Open Science .

Conditions of publication

Articles must not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. The main findings of the article should not have been reported in the mass media. Like many journals Royal Society Open Science employs a strict embargo policy where the reporting of a scientific article by the media is embargoed until a specific time. The Editor has final authority in all matters relating to publication.

Collaboration with the Royal Society of Chemistry

Royal Society Open Science is published in collaboration with the Royal Society of Chemistry.

As part of this collaboration the Royal Society of Chemistry manages the editorial aspects up to acceptance, including editorial content development and peer-review, for articles published in the chemistry section of Royal Society Open Science .

Please see our Chemistry Editorial Board page for more details of the collaboration.

Abstracting and indexing

Royal Society Open Science is indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, and Scopus, DOAJ, and Astrophysics Data System (ADS), as well as many other indexes.