Ron Hacker FARS – Chair, Publications Committee.  Email: ron.hacker@crt.net.au

Starting in 2019 CSIRO Publishing will make one paper per issue of The Rangeland Journal available open access. At present the Editor-in-Chief of the journal nominates one paper per issue which is free to download for a limited time but under the new arrangement this paper will be permanently free to download and may be shared, copied or redistributed in any medium or format. This is just another benefit which members, and in this case also the public at large, will derive under the Society’s new publishing contract which came into effect at the start of this year.

At present, the number of Open Access papers published in the journal each year usually does not exceed 10 per cent unless the sponsors of a special issue elect to have the whole issue published in this form. Authors, or special issue proponents, pay a fee to have their work freely available. Another benefit of the new publishing contract, as noted in the last Range Management Newsletter, is that this fee for ARS members ($1,500) is half that charged for non-members. Increasingly, it can be expected that research funders will require papers resulting from the work they support to be freely available. This trend is already strongly entrenched in some research fields and some countries e.g. medical research in Europe and Great Britain. The development of this trend in areas within the scope of The Rangeland Journal will probably be slower.