825 institutions in 49 countries are now participating in The Company of Biologists’ Read & Publish initiative
We are delighted to announce that the number of institutions participating in our cost-neutral Read & Publish Open Access (OA) initiative has increased by 37% since January 2023.
825 institutions in 49 countries are now participating. We have agreements with eighteen library consortia, and we have recently renewed our agreements with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Electronic Information for Libraries EIFL and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) in Germany, for a further three-year term. We have seen growth in Germany and significant growth in the Republic of Korea, thanks to new consortium agreements with ZB Med – Information Centre for Life Sciences, and the Korean E-resource Service for Library Consortium (KESLI) and the Korean Council for University Education (KCUE) Consortium, respectively. We have also seen a substantial increase in North America including a new consortium agreement with the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). We also anticipate further growth in China given our agreement with the Digital Resource Acquisition Alliance of Chinese Academic Libraries (DRAA).
The success of our Read & Publish initiative continues to drive growth in the proportion of OA research content in our hybrid journals — Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology — which were the first in the world to be afforded Transformative Journal status by Plan S. All three Transformative Journals met their targets for OA growth in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
We are also delighted that over 90% of libraries have opted to include our fully OA journals — Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open — in their Read & Publish agreements in 2024. This shift not only reduces barriers to publishing and accessing research articles but enables corresponding authors at participating institutions to publish an uncapped number of OA research articles in our two fully OA journals as well as our hybrid journals– without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC).
