The American Physical Society has announced that as of February 15, 2011, authors in most Physical Review journals will have a new alternative to pay an article-processing charge whereby their accepted manuscripts will be available barrier-free and open access on publication. These manuscripts will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY). The most permissive of the CC licenses, CC-BY grants authors and others the right to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work, provided that proper credit is given. This new alternative is in addition to traditional subscription-funded publication. Authors may choose one or the other for their accepted papers.

The new article-processing charges, which will cover all costs and provide a sustainable funding model, have been set at $1700 for papers in the Physical Review and $2700 for those in Physical Review Letters. The resulting open access articles will appear alongside and mixed in with subscription-funded articles, converting these journals into ‘hybrid’ open access journals. Revenue from the article-processing charges will decrease the need for subscription income and help to keep the APS subscription price-per-article among the lowest of any physics journals.

Also as of February 15, Physical Review Special Topics – Accelerators and Beams (PRST-AB) and Physical Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research (PRST-PER) will have their full archives and all future papers made available under the CC-BY license, thereby converting both of these journals to ‘gold’ open access journals. PRST-PER’s publication-charge scheme has been realigned with the new programme. PRST-AB will continue to be funded by its sponsors. Finally, APS’s Free to Read program will be phased out, and all of these papers covered by the CC-BY license.

These developments for existing APS journals follow the announcement in January of a new journal, Physical Review X (PRX), an online-only, fully open access, primary research journal covering all of physics and its applications to related fields.”

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter 2/16/11