Open access policy
We are committed to open science and to serving the needs of molecular bioscientists in the best way possible. In support of this, we offer open access (OA) routes in all of our journals, ensuring author commitment and funder compliance.
We have adopted the ALPSP/NISO Recommended Practices for Journal Article Versions (the VoR and AAM). A submitted manuscript that has been peer reviewed and is accepted for publication becomes an Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) at the point of acceptance. A final corrected, formatted and published article becomes the Version of Record (VoR).
Our current routes to OA are described below.
Gold open access
Whether an article is being published OA or not has no bearing on the editorial decision or the outcome of peer review. The decision to publish an article is governed entirely by the peer review process and our Editorial Boards.
Read & Publish agreements
We offer Read & Publish (R&P) agreements to institutions, combining access to journal content with unlimited, guaranteed OA publishing across all our journals. Corresponding authors based at institutions that have signed a Read & Publish (R&P) agreement will be published OA by default under a CC BY licence with no additional charges to the institution or author. Agreements cover our entire portfolio, including our fully OA journal (Bioscience Reports), and all article types are eligible.
CHECK IF YOU ARE COVERED BY AN R&P AGREEMENT
Conditional open access with Subscribe to Open
For the current year’s volume, the content of the journals listed below will be made OA if we meet our threshold for subscription renewal commitments.
- Biochemical Journal
- Clinical Science
- Biochemical Society Transactions
- Essays in Biochemistry
- Emerging Topics in Life Sciences
By 1 March, the OA status of the journals will be announced on this page. Any articles that were published within the volume prior to the decision will be retrospectively made OA, and all subsequent articles in the volume will be made immediately OA. This will be at no charge to authors.
Gold open access via an article publishing charge
Article publishing charges (APCs) for OA are only offered in our fully OA journal (Bioscience Reports) if there is no R&P agreement in place.
APCs are not available in any other journal titles.
Green open access and archiving
The final published VoR for articles not published OA may not be shared or posted to institutional repositories, personal webpages, blogs, listservs, ResearchGate or any other websites that are not password protected. Authors are not normally permitted to share the VoR of articles on a website that is open to the public. Please check our policy on the sharing of articles on our Terms page.
We allow deposit of the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in institutional or subject repositories without embargo. As a service to institutions in the UK who have signed up to R&P, we automatically deposit AAMs from corresponding authors into institutional repositories (via the OA Switchboard).
Immediate Green deposition is supported as a way for authors to achieve funder and institutional compliance across all our journals.
When archiving an AAM, please:
- Make clear that this is not the final VoR.
- Include a link to the VoR on the journal website.
- Ensure that the journal carrying the final published version of the article is attributed.
Discounts and waivers
To ensure there are no barriers to publishing in our journals, a range of discounts and waivers are available.
Members of the Biochemical Society receive a discounted APC across our titles. For Emerging Topics in Life Sciences, members of the Royal Society of Biology also receive a discounted APC.
As members of the Research4Life initiative, we offer discounts to those countries on the HINARI Group B list and full waivers to those countries on the HINARI Group A list.
Where applicable, APCs are collected on behalf of the Biochemical Society/Portland Press by the Copyright Clearance Center. Any applicable discounts will be automatically applied on the payment screen
Licensing, copyright and permissions
By default, articles published OA are published under a CC BY licence.
The CC BY licence lets others distribute, revise and build upon the published article, even commercially, as long as they credit the author and original article. This is the most accommodating of all the licences offered and will be compliant with mandates and OA policies of funding bodies.
Authors in our journals retain copyright and assign us, as the publisher, an exclusive Licence to Publish. This is the case for all published articles. More information on copyright and permissions can be found on our Terms page.
Anyone may share the final published VoR of Gold OA articles on any websites, including blogs, personal pages, institutional repositories and subject archives. We encourage individuals to include a link to the published article on the journal page when re-posting, sharing or re-using an article (in whole or in part) elsewhere.
