Royal Society Wises Up - a Bit

A little while back I wrote in fairly unflattering terms about the Royal Society's attitude to open access. Things seem to have shifted somewhat since then:

The Royal Society today (21 June 2006) launched a trial of an open access' journal service, which will allow people to read new scientific papers free of charge immediately after they are published on the web. The new service offers authors the opportunity to pay a fee to have their paper made freely available on the web immediately if it is accepted for publication by any Royal Society journal. The first paper to be published under the new service appears on the Royal Society's website today.

That's good, although the pricing structure is sufficiently high as to discourage most people from taking this option. And despite what the press release says, I can't find the first OA article on the Web site: I've looked moderately hard, and after 13 years of Web-life, I'm not unskilled at finding stuff online.

So the move is probably more useful for pro-OA propaganda purposes than anything else; in particular, it may help some of the other important decisions that are due to be made on mandating open access, for example, those in the UK and Europe. (Via Open Access News.)