FAQs for readers and authors

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• Why has The Company of Biologists moved to a new platform?

  The Company of Biologists regularly reviews its agreements with all its partners as part of a due diligence process. After careful consideration and a thorough tender process, the decision was made to move the hosting of our five prestigious journals to the Silverchair platform. By doing so we aim to improve user experience and maximise the discoverability of the journals’ content for the biological community.

• Have the journal URLs changed?

  Yes, new URLs are in place now the journals have moved to the new platform. The new URLs are:

  • 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
• Are there any changes to browser support, accessibility, mobile access?  

  There are no changes to browser support and mobile access. The move to the Silverchair platform offers 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.

• How does the move to a new platform impact linking from reading lists, bookmarked links, library catalogues, etc?  

  Redirects are in place, but we recommend updating links to the new structure as soon as possible.

• Have there been any changes to DOIs? Has the DOI registry been updated to reflect new URLs?  

  No changes have been made to the DOIs, but the DOI registry has been updated to reflect the new URLs.

  We have also started to assign DOIs to articles in our historical archive that did not yet have a DOI. These are gradually being added to Crossref, so for a short period of time you might see a DOI on an older article that is not yet linked. In the meantime, these articles can be cited through the volume, issue and page number.

• Will the RSS feeds I was using previously continue to feed to my RSS reader?  

  As our URLs have changed, the original RSS feeds will no longer feed to your RSS reader. You can set up new RSS feeds via the links below:

  • Development
  • Journal of Cell Science
  • Journal of Experimental Biology
  • Disease Models & Mechanisms
  • Biology Open
• Will my personal subscriptions and/or articles I have purchased still be accessible?  

  Yes,  you will still be able to access your personal subscription or any articles purchased pre-migration.

• Have my email alerts been transferred over to the new platform?

  Some of the email alerts that you receive from us are transferrable and some are not.

  If you were previously signed up to one of the following alert types, we have transferred these alerts across and you have been contacted by email with further account information:

  • Accepted manuscripts
  • Latest published articles
  • Table of contents or Table of contents awareness

  If you were not signed up to one of the above, we were not be able to create a user account for you on the new system, but you will be able to do so easily on the My account page.

  For all alerts that are related to searches, i.e. citation alerts, correction alerts and keyword/author alerts, we are unable to transfer these over to the new system, but these can easily bet set up on the new sites.

• If I have published a paper with one of your journals, will the article usage data be retained?

  We have every intention to transfer article usage data for authors and readers from the old to the new platform after migration and are currently discussing this with both platform providers.

• Can you search for content across all journals on the new website?

  Yes,  on the new website content is easily searchable across our portfolio of journals. Visit journals.biologists.com/advanced-search to search for anything from keywords to authors and choose which journals you would like to include in the search.

• Who do I contact if I have any further questions?

  If you have any migration-related questions that are not covered above, please email info@biologists.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible.