Over 650 institutions in 41 countries are participating in The Company of Biologists’ Read & Publish initiative in 2023
28 June 2023
We are delighted to announce that a further 58 institutions have joined our cost-neutral Read & Publish Open Access (OA) initiative since January 2023.
Over 650 institutions in 41 countries are now participating. In addition, a further two library consortia; the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) and the Joint University Librarians Advisory Committee (JULAC) Consortium in Hong Kong, have also recently signed agreements increasing the number of participating consortia to 12.
The success of our Read & Publish initiative is continuing to drive significant growth in the proportion of OA research content in our hybrid journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology – which were the first in the world to be afforded Transformative Journal status by Plan S. All three Transformative Journals met their targets for Open Access growth in both 2021 and 2022. Our increasing proportions of OA content are driven by our Read & Publish agreements, which represented 71% of the total number of Open Access articles published in the hybrid journals in 2022.
We are also delighted that nearly half of participating libraries have opted to include our fully Open Access journals – Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open – in their Read & Publish agreements in 2023.
Shelly Turner, Head of Sales and Business Development at The Company of Biologists:
“We are delighted with the continuing support for our Read & Publish initiative from our library customers and library consortia around the world. We are also thrilled that nearly half of our Read & Publish customers are benefitting from the five-journal package which offers uncapped submission of Open Access research articles in our three hybrid and two fully Open Access journals which will help us to reach our targets for OA growth over the coming years.”
Claire Moulton, Publisher, The Company of Biologists:
“As part of our long-standing commitment to OA and our track record of innovation, we were one of the first not-for-profit publishers to launch a Read & Publish initiative. The ongoing success of the initiative is supporting our Transformative Journal strategy and has helped us to meet our targets for OA growth. We have also been delighted with the fantastic feedback we have had from authors who have benefitted from immediate and fee-free OA publishing in our journals, particularly from early-career researchers for whom lack of funding can be a major issue.”
About The Company of Biologists
The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publishing organisation dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community. We partner with libraries and library consortia to enable biologists worldwide to access our leading peer-reviewed hybrid journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology.
We have a long-standing and ongoing commitment to Open Access. Our cost-neutral Read & Publish initiative enables corresponding authors at participating institutions to publish an uncapped number of OA research articles in our hybrid journals and our two fully OA journals – Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). We were the first not-for-profit publisher to commit to the Transformative Journal approach and our journals were the first to be awarded Transformative Journal status by Plan S. Over 650 institutions in 41 countries are now participating in our cost-neutral Read & Publish OA initiative. We also have Read & Publish agreements with twelve library consortia.
Learn more about our new bio-positive publishing initiative, The Forest of Biologists
