Read & Publish Open Access initiative

The Company of Biologists has been committed to Open Access since 2004 because we believe that immediate and free availability of high-quality research helps us to achieve our mission of advancing excellence in the biological and biomedical sciences worldwide.

We were one of the first not-for-profit journal publishers to launch a cost-neutral Read & Publish initiative and over 500 institutions in 39 countries are participating.

We have agreements with library consortia in eight countries and an agreement with an international library organisation covering a further 30 countries.

We are delighted that the initiative is continuing to go from strength to strength and that the number of participating institutions more than doubled from June 2021 to June 2022. Read the announcement.

What are Read & Publish agreements?

Available to libraries and library consortia for a single annual fee, our standard Read & Publish agreements offer unlimited “read” access to our three subscription journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology – plus uncapped fee-free Open Access publishing of research articles.

Libraries can also choose to include our two fully Open Access journals – Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open – in their Read & Publish agreement.

Read
Unlimited access to all current and available archive content dating back to 1853

Publish
Free and uncapped publication of Open Access research articles

What are the benefits of Read & Publish agreements?

Our standard Read & Publish agreements offer many benefits to libraries, library consortia and researchers and authors:

unlimited access to our three subscription journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology – including the full archive dating back to 1853 (even if your library does not currently subscribe to them all)
uncapped fee-free publishing of Open Access research articles for all corresponding authors under CC BY licence terms, with authors retaining copyright in our subscription journals or our subscription journals plus our Open Access journals – Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open
compliant with funder mandates including Plan S
automatic recognition of corresponding authors and straightforward submission process
transparent, cost-neutral pricing calculated on the basis of current subscription spend plus the annual average APC spend (if any) over the last three years
single fee covers both reading and publishing and multi-year agreements are available
switching from a subscription to a Read & Publish agreement is straightforward