The Royal Society is fully green again, endorsing unembargoed OA self-archiving of the author’s final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, thereby reinstating the world’s most venerable publisher on the side of the angels, where it belonged all along, historically.
With much gratitude from the research community and posterity!
In its OA FAQ, the Royal Society OA misdefines Green OA as follows:
“Green open access: Authors may deposit a pre-print of their article in a repository at any time and they may deposit the final, accepted manuscript version of their article in a repository from 12 months after publication.”
Whereas one can be agnostic about the hybrid gold OA option that the RS and many publishers are offering (including the promise of transparency in translating hybrid Gold OA uptake increases into subscription price reductions), this takes on an entirely different complexion if the publisher is not Green (as, for example, CUP, APS, IOP, AAAS, Springer and Elsevier all are, whereas OUP and NPG, and now possibly the RS, are not).
For if the publisher imposes a 1-year embargo, that is tantamount to a constraint — on any author that needs and wants immediate OA — to pay for the hybrid Gold OA option instead of just providing Green OA.
See also: Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society (2005)