The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has today announced that all journals published by the Society will be Open Access (OA) from January 2024. This move will enable everyone in the global community to have free, immediate, and unrestricted access to the high-quality research published in the portfolio of RAS journals.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters (MNRASL), and Geophysical Journal International (GJI) will join RAS Techniques and Instruments (RASTI), a new journal launched by the Society in 2021, in being fully OA. The RAS journals portfolio will continue to publish alongside Astronomy & Geophysics, the RAS’s magazine for its Fellows, which will see no change.
All articles published in the RAS journals portfolio, from the very first volumes published in 1827 to the latest articles, will be free to read in their entirety. As the scientific community works ever harder to ensure barriers to cutting edge science are eliminated, facilitating openness, dissemination, and reproducibility of impactful academic research, the Society is excited to be a key contributor to the open science movement, helping to drive discoverability and change.
With this move to OA the journals will no longer charge subscription fees and will instead be supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs), with the infrastructure to ensure that authors continue to face no financial barrier to publishing their science in the RAS journals.
The Society will support authors during the transition with an information hub on each of the journal websites, which can be accessed via the links below:
