(1) From the Financial Times, June 20, 2006: Royal Society tests new system of free access to papers By Jon Boone in London The world’s oldest learned society will on Wednesday tear up its 340-year-old business model with the launch of an “open access” journal allowing people to read its new scientific papers free of charge. The Royal Society in London virtually invented the subscription-based system of peer-reviewed scientific journals when it started the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665. But in a trial that will be closely watched by researchers and journal publishers around the world, it will allow authors to pay for costs of publication themselves. Authors, or their research sponsors, who choose to pay to make their papers immediately available online will be charged £300 ($553, €439) per A4 page... The Royal Society hopes to test the viability of the scheme by charging the full economic cost of publication. ... The open access movement has been helped by recent developments, including the decision by the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest research granting bodies, that all articles produced through work it has funded will have to be published on an open access basis from October. The Royal Society’s first paper published on Wednesday is being financed by the trust... News Item (2)..... It seems that open access journal publishing, known as the "gold" version of OA, isn't paved with gold. In an eye-opening analysis in the journal Nature, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which launched its first open access journals in 2003, is said to be facing a "looming financial crisis." According to Nature, which analyzed the non-profit PLoS's publicly available records on file with the Internal Revenue Service, PLoS ran a deficit of almost $1 million last year, and its total income from fees and advertising currently covers just 35 percent of its costs. While revenue is increasing slightly, spending is increasing at a greater clip, up to $5.5 million over the past three years combined. In response, with its grant funds being steadily depleted, PLoS has announced that it will raise author fees, effective July 1, for its open access journals from $1500 to $2500 for flagship journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine; and to $2000 for its community journals PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens. In a release, officials from the non-profit PLoS said that, with three years of operational experience to draw on, it was "time to adjust this model so that our publication fees reflect more closely the costs of publication." Still, even with the increased fees, Nature reports that PLoS will have to rely on "philanthropy" to survive for the foreseeable future, including its funding from the Sandler and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations. PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson downplayed the financial situation, noting that the fledgling publisher is only in its fourth year. Still, more than a few commercial publishers may be saying "I told you so." In the early days of open access publishing, commercial publishers repeatedly suggested that author fees for PLoS, at $1500, and for-profit open access publisher BioMed Central, then $500, were unsustainably low. Last year, BioMed Central increased its author fees, from $525 to as much as $1700. Commercial competitors, meanwhile, including Springer, Blackwell, and most recently Elsevier, have begun offering open-access-like publishing options, for fees closer to $3000. Dr. S.Krishnan Head, Information Division National Chemical Laboratory Pashan Road PUNE 411008, INDIA e-mail: s.krishnan@ncl.res.in Tel: +91-20-25902650