The Biochemical Society is pursuing a staged approach to ensuring all authors have a compliant open access (OA) route to publication in all seven of our journals.  

The next phase of our transition sees the lifting of embargo periods under a revised green OA policy. All our authors will now be able to immediately deposit their accepted manuscripts into institutional and/or subject-based repositories, with this change providing a compliant route to publication for all authors regardless of where they are based or whether they have grant funding available. 

It’s a move that will help spread the benefits of OA publishing and is underpinned by the key principles driving our broader work in this area, including: 

• Sustainability and the importance of safeguarding the support we provide for the molecular bioscience community through our charitable activities. 
• Integrity and the minimising of financial incentives implicit in dominant OA models, pursuing qualitative rather than quantitative metrics and decoupling article volume from income growth. 
• Inclusion & equity and dissolving the link between the ability to publish research and any individual researcher’s ability to pay for publication. 
  
  

In response to this development, Chair of Portland Press Board, Professor Nigel Hooper, says: 

“Having recently outlined our future publishing vision and the steps we’re taking to support open scholarship, we’re enthusiastic about the opportunities to remove author-facing fees from OA publishing. To enable a transition away from paywalls, we’re looking to offer multiple pathways to OA, which will be supported through existing and new partnerships with researchers, institutions, consortia, and funders. Sustainability, integrity, and inclusion and equity are at the heart of our planned approach.” 
 

Read more about our path to open scholarship here.