Royal Society has come out against Open Access Journals?

There are claims that the Royal Society, the original scientific scholarly society, have come out strongly against Open Access.

There are a number of stories, including boing boing and SciDevNet, but I'm personally not convinced that this story represents the considered opinion of the Royal Society as a whole. The issue is challenging for the Royal Society, because like many scholarly societies they currently derive a large portion of their income from selling journals to institutional libraries. On the other hand, open access can provide faster, cheaper and more transparent submission, peer review, publication and dissemination than printed journals or closed electronic journals.

Reading the summary of the Royal Society submission to the Research Councils UK Open Access consultation:

The Royal Society agrees with the four principles that RC UK outlines in its document: accessibility to publicly-funded research; rigorous quality assurance through peer review; efficient and cost-effective mechanisms for publication and access to research results; and long-term preservation and accessibility of research outputs. However we do not believe that RC UK's proposals are the best way of achieving these objectives.

 

All their significant qualms appear to be about funding.