I’m thrilled that the University of California has renewed its transformative Open Access agreement with The Company of Biologists, a mission-driven, community-led publisher that shares UC’s goal of making the scholarly publishing landscape more open. I was a member of the team that negotiated the first Open Access agreement between UC and The Company of Biologists. I have been an author with The Company of Biologists for more than 20 years, and since the start of UC’s partnership with the Company in 2021, UC authors have published more than 85 Open Access articles in its journals, increasing the visibility and impact of their research. I hope that even more UC authors will take advantage of this renewed agreement and make their scholarship freely available to researchers and anyone else around the world by publishing Open Access in The Company of Biologists’ journals.”
Read & Publish agreements are an alternative to the traditional subscription model. This agreement will help the researchers/authors from IISERs gradually tip the balance of their publishing output towards Open Access, making the process smoother and research more impactful. The recent collaboration with The Company of Biologists signals a promising surge in scholarly output from IISERs, ushering in a new era of accessible and impactful research. With a Read & Publish agreement in place at IISER Bhopal, article processing charges (APCs) will be waived by the publisher and authors can publish gold Open Access (OA). Authors will also have access to every paper in their journal portfolio.
Publishing Open Access is a vital part of conducting equitable science by making research publications accessible to people who operate outside traditional academic institutions. However, the fees to publish Open Access are a barrier, especially for graduate student researchers. This agreement with The Company of Biologists will greatly contribute to the impact of biology research conducted at UMass.
As a faculty member at a primarily undergraduate institute, I have limited research funds. The Read & Publish agreement Lafayette College has with The Company of Biologists helped make publishing my work open access in Biology Open accessible to me. This helped ensure that my work would be freely available and able to reach the largest possible audience. Also, as a lover of natural spaces, I was thrilled to learn about The Forest of Biologists and that a tree would be planted in recognition of my article.
It has been a wonderful experience publishing with Journal of Cell Science and The Company of Biologists. It was delightful to learn that JCS has been contributing to saving the planet with their initiative ‘The Forest of Biologists’. As scientists, we strive to contribute for the betterment of humankind and planting a tree by publishing an article with JCS helps the mission. Publishing Open Access in JCS also has been a pleasant experience for us. It was easy to arrange with our institutional agreement and gave us positive exposure for our work.
Researchers from IISERs are very keen to publish articles in an Open Access model, without any financial burden. The agreement between the IISER Library Consortium and The Company of Biologists will boost the publications from the participating IISERs.
I was delighted to learn that our paper in Journal of Experimental Biology could be published Open Access without a fee thanks to the Read & Publish agreement between The Company of Biologists and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is a wonderful initiative that promotes the work from graduate students and early-career researchers with limited funding, allowing it to reach a wider audience around the world.
I was relieved that I would not have to use my own funding to pay an APC in order to publish my research Open Access. It definitely incentivizes me to publish in a journal from The Company of Biologists again in the future.
My lab is grateful for the initiative of fee-free Open Access publishing in Development thanks to The Company of Biologists’ Read & Publish agreement with the University of Chicago. It not only provides Open Access to our work for all readers around the globe, but also enables us to allocate funds directly to research instead of publishing fees.
As the majority of our research is funded by taxpayer money or charity donations I think it is essential that everyone can freely access and read our findings. The Read & Publish agreement between The Company of Biologists and The University of Edinburgh allowed us to publish our article immediately after acceptance and freely to everyone, with very little hassle and no additional financial responsibility from us.