New Read & Publish agreement between The Company of Biologists and the JUSTICE Consortium, Japan

22 February 2024

The Company of Biologists is delighted to announce a new Read & Publish
Open Access agreement with the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE).

This agreement, which runs from 2024 to 2026, is available to 563 member institutions on an opt-in basis. This is the Company’s first consortium agreement in Japan and Kinokuniya, our Japan representative, was influential in helping us establish this agreement.

Corresponding authors at participating institutions in Japan can publish an uncapped number of research articles immediately Open Access (OA) in our hybrid journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology) and our fully Open Access journals (Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open) without paying an article processing charge (APC). Researchers at participating institutions also benefit from unlimited access to our hybrid journals, including their full archives dating back to 1853.

Sawako Kojin, Chair of the steering committee, JUSTICE, says:

“With JUSTICE’s agreement to The Company of Biologists’ Read & Publish proposal, we are pleased to introduce a model for promoting open access in the field of biology for Japanese universities. JUSTICE believes in the importance of a healthy ecosystem for the distribution of scholarly information. We hope that the agreement with The Company of Biologists, a non-profit publishing house, will provide an opportunity to expand the diversity within the publication, rather than solely focusing on large commercial publishers.”

Shigeharu Ono, Vice President, Kinokuniya, says:

“We are delighted with the announcement of the launch of a new Read & Publish agreement between The Company of Biologists and JUSTICE — an initiative we actively contributed to. We will continue to work with The Company of Biologists and JUSTICE to support libraries and research communities in Japan.”

Sarah Logan, Regional Sales Manager at The Company of Biologists, says:

“We are pleased to announce a new Read & Publish agreement with the JUSTICE consortium in Japan, enabling JUSTICE members to seamlessly transition to Open Access publishing and provide institutions with complete access to The Company of Biologists journal content. This agreement welcomes new Read & Publish participants and provides a flexible path for other institutions to join retrospectively in 2024 or during the agreement term in 2025 or 2026.

We are grateful to Kinokuniya for establishing this initiative, which will empower authors in participating institutions to publish Open Access research in all five of our journals. We invite all Japanese institutions to explore this transformative journey with us.”

View current participating institutions

About JUSTICE
Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) promotes activities for providing academic information stably and continuously, including e-journals that are essential for the education and research activities of universities in Japan. JUSTICE was formed on 1 April 2011 as a new consortium through an alliance between the Japan Association of National University Libraries (JANUL) and the Public and Private University Libraries 3 Consortium (PULC). In line with the purpose of the “Agreement on Promotion of Collaboration and Cooperation” concluded on October 2010 between the Japanese Coordinating Committee for University Libraries and National Institute of Informatics (NII), various activities are being carried out with the primary objective of promoting the securing of electronic journals, including backfiles, and the establishment of a permanent access assurance system.

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 woldwide to access our leading peer-reviewed hybrid journals — Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology — and our fully OA journals — Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open.

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 – 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 750 institutions in 47 countries are now participating in our cost-neutral Read & Publish OA initiative. We also have Read & Publish agreements with many library consortia.

Learn more about our new bio-positive publishing initiative, The Forest of Biologists.