I was very happy to see that my university participates in the Read & Publish initiative, which facilitates publishing Open Access for free in some of my favourite journals including Development. This was particularly important for my lab in this instance because our relevant funding had just come to an end.
I wish The Company of Biologists good luck in this journey that promises to help our community overcome publishing and accessibility barriers.
When developing a tool, you don’t want it to sit on the proverbial shelf gathering dust, but you want people to use it. The free Open Access option is great because it maximises the number of people who will see your work, and then hopefully use it to make their own discoveries.
In times when grant funding is difficult to secure, we really appreciated free Open Access publication of our work in Development.
What a wonderful surprise it was to find out about the Read & Publish Open Access agreement between The Company of Biologists and McGill University which facilitates immediate access to our research to all readers without charge! This is fabulous: for science, for our trainees whose careers benefit from having their research seen quickly and widely, and for our hard-earned publicly funded research grants that can advance science further as a result. I love this initiative and I’ll be spreading the word at McGill and encouraging my trainees and colleagues to submit more papers to The Company of Biologists’ journals.
Article Processing Charges can sometimes be a financial burden on the author and can impede the accessibility of research results. The Read & Publish Open Access initiative eliminates these issues and makes it easier for researchers to make their findings available to the public. The high transparency publication of research results will greatly contribute to discussions for solving the next issue. I think that the Read & Publish program is great and it will be a great motivation for submitting my future research to related journals published by The Company of Biologists.
Happy that my first contribution to the field could be published Open Access thanks to the Read & Publish agreement. It really takes away the barriers on both sides: now anyone that wishes to read our work can do so freely, and we were able to publish our article OA despite not having publishing fees accounted for in our budget. Great initiative! Sets the stage for hopefully publishing the rest of my PhD Open Access too.
The Read & Publish Open Access Initiative is just one of the many ways in which The Company of Biologists demonstrates their commitment to supporting the research community. Open Access fees represent a significant barrier to disseminating research, and I was delighted to find out that they are waived for authors from participating institutions when publishing in Development. Another reason to publish in this excellent journal!
It means a lot to be published and have my research showcased in Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB). The Read & Publish agreement the University of Akron has with The Company of Biologists means that we can publish research articles Open Access without charge. This removes one of the major stressors of publishing from students and faculty in addition to getting our study accessed by other researchers quickly.
The cost of publishing Open Access can be a barrier to the broad dissemination of research, but low and behold this time it was free! Seemed too good to be true – had I pressed the wrong button? It seems I did not as my university has a Read & Publish agreement with The Company of Biologists. Free publishing and Open Access; we’ll be sending in more papers soon hopefully!
The Open Access agreement between The Company of Biologists and University of California allowed our research to be published for free and accessed by everyone immediately. Without this agreement, we would not have been able to afford publishing this work as Open Access. I hope that more publishers and institutions can follow such a model to really transform OA publishing.
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