Moving to the Silverchair publishing platform will result in enhancements to user experience, discoverability, accessibility and admin functionality. We are also taking the opportunity to review and improve the services that we provide to our library and discovery partners more generally.

We are working hard to ensure a seamless and transparent transition for libraries, administrators and users.

We are informing our customers by email about the schedule and any actions they need to take. If you have not received any emails about the migration and would like to be added to the list, please contact subscriptions@biologists.com.

Please also see our migration checklist for librarians.

The move is scheduled for the afternoon of  Thursday 15 April 2021 (UK time).

Yes, you can find our migration checklist for librarians here.

We recommend that you download historic COUNTER4 and COUNTER5 usage reports from our existing journal platform in advance of the migration.

Click on the links below for details. Please note that you need to log into the relevant journal website before you can run usage reports.

• Development
• Journal of Cell Science
• Journal of Experimental Biology

You will be able to access legacy COUNTER4 JR1 usage reports on the Silverchair platform for 2019, 2020 and Q1 2021 until the date of migration. These reports will be available on the Silverchair admin dashboard under the ‘pre-migration COUNTER reports’ tab.

Yes, new URLs will be in place once the journals move to the new platform. The new URLs will be:

• Development: https://journals.biologists.com/dev
• Journal of Cell Science: https://journals.biologists.com/jcs
• Journal of Experimental Biology: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb
• Disease Models & Mechanisms: https://journals.biologists.com/dmm
• Biology Open: https://journals.biologists.com/bio

No, there will be no dual running. Changes will have to be made on the day we switch to the new platform. If there are any changes to the schedule, we will let you know.

If you are not receiving email updates about the migration from us, please contact subscriptions@biologists.com to ensure that you are added to the mailing list.

There will be no changes to browser support and mobile access. The move to the Silverchair platform will offer several improvements to accessibility.

The new platform is optimised for modern browsers. If you are currently using Internet Explorer we encourage you to upgrade to Edge, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (for Mac users) for a better user experience.

There should be no any interruption to the service if updates to your knowledgebase and library catalogues are made when we move platforms. However, we recommend that you check that access and links are working and report any problems to us as soon as possible.

Please update any referring URLs, proxy settings and Wayfless URLs as they will need endpoint changes to the new domains.

If you use EZprozy, the stanza will need to be updated. You can do so on migration day, but it is also possible to add the new hostname to the stanza before migration day,  as long as you do not remove the existing hostnames. This can be done by inserting the following line into the existing stanza:

HJ https://journals.biologists.com

The new domain URLs will be:

• Development: https://journals.biologists.com/dev
• Journal of Cell Science: https://journals.biologists.com/jcs
• Journal of Experimental Biology: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb
• Disease Models & Mechanisms: https://journals.biologists.com/dmm
• Biology Open: https://journals.biologists.com/bio

If your library has a hosted EZProxy, you will need to contact OCLC to make the changes.

Your username will remain the same, but you will need to change your password on the new platform. Instructions on how to do this will be made available closer to launch date.

There will be no changes to the DOIs but the DOI registry will be updated to reflect the new URLs.

Article by DOI:
URL format: https://journals.biologists.com/[site abbreviation]/article-lookup/DOI/[ ]
Example: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article-lookup/DOI/10.1242/jeb.234070

Article by volume/issue/page or content ID:
URL format: https://journals.biologists.com/[site abbreviation]/article-lookup article-lookup/[volume]/[issue]/[page or CID]
Example: https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article-lookup/133/24/jcs245571

We have informed Infotrieve, Reprints Desk, CCC, PLS, OCLC, Ebsco and Ex Libris/ProQuest so they can update their knowledgebases and discovery tools. We have also informed PubMed, CrossRef, Web of Science and Scopus.

Knowledgebases should be updated by the service owners. However, please check as soon as possible after migration and contact your discovery service account manager if you do not see the updated links.

If you hold your knowledgebase locally you may need to update the knowledgebase yourself.

KBART files for our subscription and Open Access journals can be downloaded here. They will also be accessible to librarians within the new administrator dashboard on the Silverchair platform.

As our URLs are changing, the original RSS feeds will no longer feed to your RSS reader. You can set up new RSS feeds once the new pages are live.

Post-migration, library administrators will be able to:

• update institution details (name, address, phone number)
• upload institutional logos
• update admin contact details (name, username, password)
• manage Shibboleth and OpenURL link resolver information
• download IP addresses

Full details will be provided.

No. We are working closely with Silverchair to import the IDs, federations and affiliations for existing Shibboleth users.

No.

Yes.

We publish three specialist peer-reviewed subscription journals which have provided access to the latest, high-quality biological science research since 1853:

• Development
• Journal of Cell Science
• Journal of Experimental Biology

We also publish two Open Access journals:

• Disease Models & Mechanisms
• Biology Open

Yes, Read & Publish agreements are available to libraries and library consortia worldwide. You can find out more here.

Please contact our subscriptions team:

• Email: subscriptions@biologists.com
• Telephone +44 (0) 1223 632850

Yes, we have negotiated Subscription and Read & Publish agreements with library consortia in many parts of the world.

We have exclusive agents in Brazil, China and Japan. We also work with agents in other countries on a non-exclusive basis.

All enquiries should be sent to subscriptions@biologists.com in the first instance.

No, we no longer offer personal subscriptions.

Free trials are available to institutions. Please email subscriptions@biologists.com for details.

The Company of Biologists’ five journals will be moving to the Silverchair publishing platform in Spring 2021. The launch is currently scheduled for mid-April 2021.

See FAQs about the journal platform migration

We are committed to ensuring that institutions do not pay twice for access to OA content included within hybrid journals via author publishing charges (APCs) and subscription fees.

We do this through annual adjustments to our subscription pricing.

• The first adjustment was made in 2015. We discounted the online subscription price of our journals by a percentage which equalled the value of APC income received in the last complete financial year (2013).
• Discounts accrued and applied to the subscription prices have not and will not be reversed, even if the value of APCs being returned through subscription pricing exceeds the funds that we receive.
• All online subscribers benefit from the accrued discounts, including consortia and Tier 5 institutions.

We also review our policies annually to ensure APC income is returned in full to the community, therefore avoiding ‘double dipping’.

We have participated in OA since 2004 because we believe OA publishing is good for science as it leads to wider dissemination, higher readership of articles, content reuse, and an acceleration in the sharing of quality research.

We support Open Access via three main routes:

1. High quality Open Access publishing
2. Cost-neutral Read & Publish Open Access agreements with libraries and library consortia
3. Our commitment to the Transformative Journal approach

Read our Open Access story.

Our Copyright and Permissions policy can be viewed here.

We fully support the LOCKSS programme, a multi-institutional, multi-publisher initiative to create a permanent web publishing and access system. Content preserved by libraries through LOCKSS becomes a part of their collection and they have perpetual access to 100% of titles preserved in their LOCKSS box.

We have also partnered with CLOCKSS, the community governed and supported digital preservation archive for scholarly content. This gives libraries the assurance that they will have a secure preservation solution and permanent access to our journals should a ‘trigger event’ ever occur.

Yes, online access to our subscription journals is available free to researchers in many developing economies through the following initiatives:

• Hinari – Research for Health
• OARE – Online Access to Research in the Environment
• AGORA – Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture

If your institution has a subscription, and you are accessing our journals via your institutional network, you will automatically have access to the tables of contents, abstracts, full text searching, full text display, PDFs, Medline and GenBank links, and tables of contents in progress.

You may also see your institution’s name or logo on webpages.

If this happens, the IP address for your machine is not being recognised by our server. This could be because:

• your institutional subscription has expired or has not yet been activated
• all valid IP addresses may not have been registered in your institution’s account
• some subnets of your institution may be routed through a proxy server that has not been authorised by The Company of Biologists

In the first instance talk to your librarian and let them know you are having difficulties or contact us at subscriptions@biologists.com.

If you do not have access through an institutional subscription, you can search the full text of our journals and access table of contents, abstracts and the full text of articles published more than six months previously. You can also purchase access to individual new articles.

If you do not have access to our journals through an institutional subscription, you can purchase short-term access to an article where a PDF link is available on the Journal’s website.

Individual print copies may also be ordered via document supply services such as the British Library Document Supply Centre.

Alternatively, we can supply you with a print copy of the journal issue in which the article appeared, if it is from the current or previous two volumes. Please contact sales@biologists.com.

We are a not-for-profit publisher with a mission to support biologists and inspire biology. We have been committed to Open Access since 2004, as we believe immediate and free access to the latest research is important for the advancement of science.

Our cost-neutral Read & Publish initiative (launched in November 2019) is the latest step in our Open Access journey.

Read & Publish agreements support researchers and institutions in complying with funder mandates. They also reduce the barriers to reading, publishing and sharing articles.

We look forward to working with libraries and library consortia to accelerate a cost-neutral transition to Open Access and to increase submissions and usage.

Read more in our Open Access story.

As is the case with traditional subscription agreements, Read & Publish agreements are typically negotiated and signed by institutional libraries.

However, whereas subscription agreements cover access to content, Read & Publish agreements (which can vary between publishers) also cover Open Access publishing.

The Company of Biologists’ Read & Publish agreements are cost neutral, and offer generous terms:

• researchers at participating institutions get unlimited access to our three hybrid subscription journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology – and their archives dating back to 1853
• corresponding authors at participating institutions also benefit from uncapped Open Access publication of research articles

Initial pricing for Read & Publish agreements is based on an institution’s subscription spend on one, two or three of our hybrid journals (“Read” fee), plus the average annual Article Processing Charge (APC) spend (if any) over the prior 3 years (“Publish” fee).

For this single annual fee, Read & Publish agreements offer unlimited access to all three of our hybrid subscription journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology – plus uncapped Open Access publishing of research articles in all three journals even if the “Read fee” is calculated on the basis of a subscription to one or two journals.

If your institution does not currently subscribe to any of our journals, a flat-fee Read & Publish price applies.

For library consortia, we apply the above pricing structure as standard, i.e. the member institutions’ previous year’s subscription spend (“Read” fee), plus the average annual Article Processing Charge (APC) spend over the prior three years (“Publish” fee). The total consortium price will depend on the number of institutions within the consortium wishing to participate in the agreement.

Yes, two- and three-year agreements are available.

A list of participating libraries is available here.

A list of participating library consortia is available here.

Read & Publish agreements benefit libraries, researchers and science.

Benefits for libraries include:

• transparent cost-neutral pricing
• ease of administration – single annual fee covering “read” and “publish” with no separate Article Processing Charges (APCs) to manage
• regular reporting of Open Access articles published under the agreement
• bespoke multi-year agreements

Benefits for researchers include:

• unlimited access to Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology including back files dating from 1853 – even if your library does not currently subscribe to them all
• uncapped, immediate and fee-free Open Access publishing of research articles in our subscription journals for all corresponding authors under CC-BY licence terms, with authors retaining copyright
• easy compliance with funders’ Open Access mandates
• automatic deposition to PubMed Central
• higher visibility of articles

Find out more about benefits for researchers.

Yes, an expanding range of resources – including social media graphics, posters and website banners – are available in our librarian toolkit. If you would like customised versions including your institutional or library logo, please email subscriptions@biologists.com.

The principle of “cost neutrality” to describe Read & Publish agreements was agreed between libraries and publishers in the SPA OPS (Society Publishers Accelerating Open Access and Plan S) project which was funded by the Wellcome Trust, UKRI and ALPSP. See the final project report.

Read & Publish agreements can be termed “cost neutral” if:

• pricing is based on the current “read” (i.e. subscription) fee plus the average annual “publish” fee (i.e. article processing charges) paid by the institution over the previous two or three years
• there is no uplift for the institution as a whole, even if the number of Open Access being published under the agreement increases

Please see our Read & Publish guide for authors.

The corresponding author (CA) has an important role, taking primary responsibility for communication with the journal (through submission, peer review, revisions, proofs etc), ensuring that all co-authors agree to the contents of the manuscript (and any revisions) and that all matters comply with the policies of the journal, as well as signing the Publication Agreement and arranging payment of an article processing charge, where required.

The CA should also be available for any post-publication queries (correspondence from other members of the community, requests for materials and data, ethics queries etc). In addition, the role of CA is often seen to confer a level of seniority and experience.

The CA should ensure that all co-authors have agreed authorship and contributorship (using the CRediT taxonomy) before submission. The choice of CA on a manuscript should be based on the above commitments rather than any financial considerations.

Yes. All articles published via Read & Publish will automatically be deposited in PubMed Central.

In addition, we deposit in US NLM PMC for funders that mandate this repository (for release after 6 or 12 months as mandated). For funders that require deposit in Europe PMC or other publicly available repositories, we allow self-archiving of the final published PDF for release 12 months after publication or as otherwise mandated.

We have actively engaged with the Open Access movement since 2004 because it helps us to deliver our mission to support biologists and inspire biology. Open Access publishing leads to broader dissemination and faster reuse, accelerating the sharing of quality information.

We publish two fully Open Access journals, Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open. Both are indexed in DOAJ. Authors can publish Open Access in these titles, or they can publish Open Access in our subscription-based journals, under a CC_BY licence. We also deposit authors’ articles into PubMed Central.

Read our Open Access story.

The Open Access landscape is changing fast, and it’s hard to predict what the future will bring. We have demonstrated our commitment to the Open Access movement since 2004, and we believe that our Read & Publish initiative has the potential to be a long-term, transformative solution that will work for us as a not-for-profit publisher as well as for our community.

Online-only subscriptions, combined print/online subscriptions and Read & Publish Open Access agreements are available for our hybrid journals: Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology.

Subscriptions are available on a calendar year (January to December).

Subscriptions are subject to the completion of a licence and, by paying for subscriptions, subscribers are also agreeing to our Copyright Policy and Terms and Conditions.

We have a 5-tier pricing model for institutional subscriptions.

Pricing for tiers 1-4 is available here.

Pricing for Tier 5 institutions and library consortia is negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

To request a quote and/or subscribe, please contact us at subscriptions@biologists.com and provide the following information:

• Journal name
• Full name and address of organisation
• Number of site locations
• FTE
• Tier coding (if known)

Single site

A single site is a single contiguous geographic region from within which the library’s “Authorized Users” and public visitors can access the Licensed Materials over a secure network.

A typical single site would have a single billing address for all subscription purchases and all physical locations accessing the Licensed Materials would be located on the same physical campus.

If the library maintains or provides service to users that are outside of one single geographical contiguous location, or multiple departments that operate independently of the parent institution, then the library may need to obtain a multi-site or consortium license.

Multi-site

A multi-site is defined as:

A non-contiguous site, i.e. a single institution with separate branches or departments that operate independently and may or may not share IP addresses and/or network services with another site.

Affiliates, partners or franchises that may or may not operate independently of the another institution and may or may not be located on the same site and may or may not share IP addresses and/or network services with another site.

You can view the licence agreement (covering both single-site and multi-site) here.

Yes, COUNTER 4 and COUNTER 5 usage reports for each journal can be downloaded by library administrators on the relevant journal website.

Click on the links below for details. Please note that you need to log into the relevant journal before you can run usage reports.

• Development
• Journal of Cell Science
• Journal of Experimental Biology

Library administrators may change usernames, passwords or contact details by following the links below

• How to change your password or contact details
• Forgotten your username and/or password

Institutional usernames and passwords are for the use of the librarian or institutional administrator only and should not be shared with library users.

Please contact subscriptions@biologists.com with a complete list of IP addresses to be registered and annotate any proxy IPs.

Please quote your subscriber number and list each IP address, or partial IP address, following these rules:

• The only characters allowed are numbers, dashes (-), or asterisks (*)
• There should be 4 segments (containing max 3 characters) and no segment of an IP address can be blank
• The allowed values for the first segment are 1-223
• The allowed values for segments 2, 3, 4 are 0-254
• The first segment cannot contain a range (-)
• The first and second segments cannot contain a wildcard (*)
• The third and fourth segments cannot both contain a range (-)

Example using both the wildcard character (*) and the range character (-):

Main site: All addresses beginning with 10.175.4 – use asterisk, in this case 10.175.4.*

Department: All addresses between 192.168.55.* and 192.168.60.* – use asterisk, in this case 192.168.55-60.*

Department: All addresses between 192.168.62.77 and 192.168.62.145 – use dashes, in this case 192.168.62.77-145

Yes, library administrators can upload institutional logos when they are logged into the institutional account.

KBART files for our subscription and Open Access journals can be downloaded here.

We are part of eduGAIN which allows us to authenticate customers from around 60 Shibboleth federations. We currently offer Shibboleth access via the following federations:

• UK
• Germany (DFN-AAI)
• United States (InCommon)
• Australian Access
• Japan (GakuNin)

Please contact subscriptions@biologists.com to request access via additional federations.

Yes, if your institution has deployed two factor authentication – specifically that each Authorised User is able to access the Licensed Materials by inputting either:

• a username and a password
• a staff ID and a PIN or
• an email address and a software token.

Proxy servers that only require a staff ID to log in (without password) are not permitted for authenticating users.

Yes, all journal homepages utilise responsive design, allowing the screen to automatically resize to fit the reader’s chosen device, so they can easily read an article on their desktop, tablet or mobile.

Authorised users may digitally transfer or print journal articles to fulfil interlibrary loan (ILL) requests for academic, research or other non-commercial libraries.

Fair Use and CONTU guidelines on the appropriate amount of ILL activity should be followed.

Authorised users may print and store individual articles for educational purposes and private study.

All copyright and other rights of The Company of Biologists in and to the Licensed Materials are reserved.

Yes, you will have access to all journal content (including archives) with the exception of articles published in the current subscription year.

The subscription fee allows for unrestricted access at one location unless a multi-site licence is in place.

Any user connecting from an authorised computer on your institutional network will be allowed access to the online journals. This includes members of the public accessing via terminals located onsite and under the control of the subscribing institution.

Authorised users may also use home computers and other mobile devices provided such use can be authenticated by the institution. Institutional proxy servers must be authorised under the Terms and Conditions of the Licence.

We require payment with order or upon receipt of an invoice.

We recommend that payment is made electronically by BACS. Please advise your bank to quote your invoice and subscriber number, in addition to sending our remittance advice to subscriptions@biologists.com.

Please contact us for our bank details or see the information provided on our invoices.

Unless specified otherwise, prices are applicable in the following regions:

• Euros (€) – for all European countries (excluding the UK)
• US Dollars ($) – for North, Central, South America and Canada
• Sterling (£) – for UK and ROW not covered above

Please ensure you use the appropriate currency when ordering/renewing journal subscriptions.

If you would like to make payment of your subscription via credit or debit card, please contact subscriptions@biologists.com.

All orders are regarded as firm and subscription payments are not refundable after the first issue has been despatched or online access has been activated.
Online access is subject to the completion of a licence or addendum to a current licence.

Please contact subscriptions@biologists.com to request a back issue quotation or make a claim for missing print issues.

Claims should be made immediately after receipt of a subsequent issue or within three months of the journal despatch date.

Claims for damage should be reported within three days of receipt of the journal issue.

Please provide the following information when making a claim:

• Your subscriber number
• Your full name and address
• The journal name
• Relevant volume number
• Issue number