We are delighted to announce that the number of institutions participating in our costneutral 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).

Shelly Turner, Head of Sales and Business Development at The Company of Biologists, says:
“We are absolutely thrilled to see such a significant number of institutions benefitting from our Read & Publish initiative. We would like to thank our library customers and consortia partners for their support of our Read & Publish initiative which allows authors from all over the world to publish fee-free Open Access research articles in our journals as well as expanding readership of our content.”

Claire Moulton, Publisher at The Company of Biologists, says:
“As part of our long-standing commitment to OA and our track record of innovation, we were one of the first not-for-profit publishers to launch a Read & Publish initiative. The ongoing success of the initiative is supporting our Transformative Journal strategy and has helped us to meet our targets for OA growth.

We continue to be delighted with the fantastic feedback that we receive from authors around the globe who have benefitted from immediate and fee-free OA publishing in our journals, particularly from early career researchers for whom lack of funding can be a major issue.”

Read the announcement online.

ENDS