Editorial January 2016
Jeremy K. M. Sanders · Royal Society Open Science · 2016
Royal Society Open Science provides an exciting new avenue for researchers across all scientific disciplines to publish their research.It offers a range of innovative features backed by one of the world's most respected scientific institutions, so I was delighted to be invited to become the first Editor-in-Chief.The key features that make Open Science different are:-It covers the whole of science, from Pure Mathematics to Psychology, and it particularly welcomes work that cuts across conventional boundaries.The recent special call for papers on City Analytics is a good example, using the emerging tools of Big Data, complexity science and dynamical systems to bring about new understanding in areas such as crowd behaviour, urban planning and energy usage.-Gold Open Access, currently with a full introductory waiver of the article processing charge: it is free to publish.-The option of open peer review, with reviewers' comments being published alongside the paper.Currently, approximately 60% of authors take up this option.-Objective peer review, which means that all research deemed scientifically sound and useful to the community will be published.Priority and impact are not considerations.-Open data principles, requiring all supporting data to be made available such that all results presented are fully reproducible.We work with several large data repositories to ensure that it is as easy as possible for authors to comply with this policy.-Compatibility with prior deposit on a pre-print server.We have integrated our submission system with ArXiv so that authors can submit files to us just by entering their ArXiv ID number.-Registered Reports, in which methods and proposed analyses are pre-registered and peer-reviewed prior to research being conducted.High-quality protocols are then provisionally accepted for publication before data collection commences.Once the study is completed, the author will finish the article including results and discussion sections.This will be appraised by the reviewers, and provided necessary conditions are met, will be published.We are the first broad scope journal to offer this type of article, broadening availability to disciplines other than psychology, neuroscience and economics.The format is open to attempts of replication as well as novel studies.