As we celebrate our 100-year anniversary in 2025, we are delighted to announce that we now have 1,000 institutions participating in our cost-neutral Read & Publish Open Access (OA) initiative.
1,000 institutions in 53 countries are now participating. We have agreements with 20 library consortia, and we have recently renewed our agreements with BIBSAM, CAUL and Jisc. We have seen growth in many regions given the support of consortia representatives and regional partners. In Europe, we have seen growth in Germany, (thanks to ZB Med – Information for Life Sciences), Italy and Spain. There has been significant growth in Asia/S. E. Asia — Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China — thanks to the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE); the Korean E-resource Service for Library Consortium (KESLI); the Korean Council for University Education Consortium (KCUE); the Digital Resource Acquisition Alliance of Chinese Academic Libraries (DRAA), and our most recent agreement with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), respectively. We continue to see a significant increase in North America and in developing and transition economy countries through our agreement with Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL).
The success of our Read & Publish initiative continues to drive growth in the proportion of OA research content in our transformative journals — Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology.
We are also delighted that nearly all libraries have opted to include our fully OA journals — Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open — in their Read & Publish agreements in 2025. 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 transformative journals – without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC).
Shelly Turner, Sales & Marketing Director at The Company of Biologists, says:
“We would like to thank our library customers and consortia partners throughout the world for their support of our Read & Publish initiative — without you, we would not have reached this amazing milestone. We are absolutely thrilled that such a significant number of institutions are able to access our content, and that more and more researchers from around the globe can publish fee-free OA research articles in our journals.”
Claire Moulton, CEO at The Company of Biologists, says:
“We are overjoyed to reach this significant landmark as we celebrate our 100-year anniversary. We launched the Read & Publish initiative as part of our long-standing commitment to OA, and we were one of the first not-for-profit publishers to introduce a Read & Publish programme. 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 all over the world who have benefitted from immediate and fee-free OA publishing in our journals.”
