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Mission and intention

Where do we want to be and by when? 

The Biochemical Society made a pledge to create a funder/institutionally compliant open access (OA) route for all published articles by February 2025. Each year, we will report the decision – which will be based on a threshold level of renewal commitments received - to open that year’s volumes. The decision will be clearly signalled on each journal’s banner which will indicate whether its contents will be OA, as well as on the Subscribe options page.  

Taking steps to safeguard the sustainability of our publishing programme, and thereby our support for the molecular bioscience community, our article on independent society publishers describes how and why we transformed our business model in support of open science.

Our transition to open took into account three vital areas:;

• Equity, diversity and inclusion 
• Transparency  
• Research integrity

These key considerations affected the choices we made, as described in further detail below. 
 

Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI)

Together with the Manifesto for Change, which commits to creating awareness, taking action and holding ourselves accountable in this space, the Biochemical Society has made a core strategic commitment to embed EDI across all activities, as driven by the Society's EDI Advisory Panel. 

Applied to our publishing programme, the Society’s EDI principles have been interwoven throughout our 2023 Open Science position statement which reinforces the belief that the ability to publish should not be linked with an individual researcher’s financial resources or circumstances. In determining a way to find a compliant OA route for all articles, transforming titles to an author-funded APC model sat in direct conflict with our stated values. We therefore sought out institutionally funded models and adapted them to our portfolio requirements.
 

Transparency 

Good governance requires a high level of public accountability. Our finances and annual reports are published through the Charity Commission (see here under charity number: 253894) and Portland Press accounts are publicly available through Companies House (see here under company number: 02453983). 
 

Research integrity

As a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), we support the aim to make ethical publishing practices an embedded part of research culture. 

The high standards of our peer review help guard against papermill activity and other forms of academic malpractice, and we have also: 

• Invested in new quality control measures to ensure the rigor and authenticity of our publications against ever more sophisticated means to fake results;  
• Introduced more checks at the submission stage, with both human and tool-based checks now standard; 
• Kept abreast of developments relating to data, intelligence, and technology across the research integrity space. 

In this new scholarly publishing climate, we hope that institutionally funded OA will promote more stability, with an inbuilt protective layer against individual authors acting without sanction.  

More background and detail on how we have been targeted and responded to papermills can be read in our piece on cultivating sustainable in-house publishing.