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Access 

Changes are being phased in as we move forward with ever greater levels of open access (OA) to our content. Please keep checking in!  

Open access

Papers published OA via a CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND licence on this platform are identified by the symbol after the article title. These or other (earlier) versions of the article may be accessible on other platforms and discovery services. 

There are some variations in how material published under a Creative Commons licence may be reused as described on Creative Commons' website. 

Attribution to the original author(s)/copyright owner(s) is a prerequisite for all forms of this licence. When citing an article, credit must be given to the author, and a link should always be included to the original ‘version of record’ (VoR) of the published article on the Portland Press platform.  

Institution access 

We are grateful to the many global institutions who support our work and enable us to publish and disseminate research. Institutional customers may access our content through purchase of a licence as detailed on the following pages: 

• Read & Publish 
• Subscribe options

We provide free or discounted access for individuals from institutions in lower income countries via the Research4Life initiative, covering both Group A and B countries.  

The current and archival contents to all of our journals are accessible online (note: some of the earlier printed issues for Clinical Science and Essays in Biochemistry are not available online). A high proportion of the content is either open or free to access and the goal is for all new articles to have an OA route by 2025. See more detail on our transition to open plans. 

Institutional customers may collect their COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, add their institution name/logo, and manage their account via the self-serve Institutional Administrator Dashboard. SUSHI reporting is also available, and a link to instructions can be found at the bottom of the 'Counter R5 Reports' page in the administrative portal. Institutional access is managed by IP authentication (with automated updates fed by the IP Registry) or via OpenAthens. 

Individual readers and members’ access 

As a benefit of membership, Biochemical Society members have personal online access to the Biochemical Journal and Biochemical Society Transactions and discounted APCs (article publishing charges). Find out more about the many other exclusive benefits of Biochemical Society membership today. Member login details (username and password) are provided upon joining and members will also be set up with an account for online access to the journals. If you have any problems with your account, please contact our Sales team.

Accessibility 

Portland Press and the Biochemical Society are committed to ensuring equal opportunities in the molecular biosciences. We want everyone who reads our journals to be able to find what they are looking for and read it with ease.  

All content is available in PDF format and content from at least 2008 onwards is available in both PDF and HTML format. Tables within articles in the HTML version are presented in an XML format which yields each cell as a separate entity rather than bundled into one image – this makes it easier for tools such as text readers to interpret them. 

We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. which has three levels of accessibility: A (lowest), AA and AAA (highest). We aim to meet AA standards for accessibility. While the majority of pages meet this standard, some parts (for example, deeper archive content) are available only as scanned PDFs and therefore have not been designed, nor do they meet the accessibility levels of the rest of the site.  Accessibility across most of the site means you should be able to: 

• Change the colours, contrast levels and fonts by adjusting browser settings; 
  
  
  • Different browsers include these options under different menus, and they can usually be found under Tools, Settings, Options, Content or Reading View, depending on the browser (for example, in Mozilla Firefox you can find this under Options: Language and Appearance).  
  
  
  • There are also browser extensions specifically dedicated to changing colours and contrast options, including Change Colors for Google Chrome and Color Changer for Mozilla Firefox. 


• Zoom in to at least 300%; 


• Navigate most of the webpages using just a keyboard, including skipping directly to main content and other important pages; 


• Listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver) or use text-to-speech tools to read out website content in both PDF and HTML format.  
  
  
  • Text-to-speech tools are built into some browsers (for example, Microsoft Edge) and are available as a plug-in for many others.  

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. 

The formats we use are not protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM). This means that assistive technology users should experience no barriers caused by print or copy restrictions; however, normal copyright conditions do still apply, details of which can be found in our OA policy.