Abstract
In 2016 the Royal Society of Chemistry announced that from January 2017 it would convert RSC Advances, the world’s largest chemistry journal, from a subscription journal to a gold open access journal. This article gives some background to the decision to convert, and provides an update on how the conversion to the new access model has gone during the first three months following conversion. The effect of the conversion on article submissions, including scientific topics covered and the geographical representation of the submitted articles, is also discussed.