Daniel Gorelick on Open Access and Read & Publish in Biology Open
Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Gorelick, talks about Biology Open, the importance of Open Access publishing and how The Company of Biologists’ Read & Publish initiative benefits researchers.
Transcript
Daniel Gorelick: My name is Daniel Gorelick, and I am the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Biology Open.
Daniel Gorelick: Biology Open is a not-for-profit Open Access journal that publishes scientific research across the entire breadth of biology and biomedical sciences. We focus on the quality of the science, not on its impact.
Daniel Gorelick: My vision for BiO is to provide the best possible experience for authors. We want scientists to submit their manuscripts to BiO because the author experience is exceptional. Rapid peer review, rigorous peer review, and unambiguous and transparent criteria that we use to accept or reject manuscripts for publication. When I say rapid, it shouldn't take 30 days to review a manuscript, it should take a week.
Daniel Gorelick: Biology Open is not-for-profit. We are run by academic research scientists for academic research scientists. All our editors are active scientists running research labs. You should submit articles to Biology Open for moral reasons, because you support non-profit publishers who use their earnings to support the biological sciences community and early-career research. And you should submit to Biology Open for practical reasons. You want your manuscript to be reviewed fairly, rigorously and quickly using a transparent rubric.
Daniel Gorelick: The benefits of Open Access publishing are moral and practical. The moral benefit is that open access enables anyone, anywhere in the world to read your discoveries and build on your research. The practical benefit is that across The Company of Biologists’ portfolio of journals, Open Access articles have increased visibility in terms of alt metrics and citations compared to non-Open Access articles. Now the moral benefit can also be accrued by depositing your manuscript on a preprint server like bioRxiv. It's free to deposit your manuscript on bioRxiv and free to read, and I encourage all authors to preprint their manuscripts. The added value of Open Access publishing is that the reader gets the benefit of reading a manuscript that was peer reviewed, which hopefully improved the manuscripts contents.
Daniel Gorelick: The Read & Publish initiative gives authors options for publishing their work at lower costs to their research budgets. With a Read & Publish agreement, in most cases, authors won't pay anything to publish in Biology Open or any of the fantastic The Company of Biologists’ journals.
