We’re delighted to share that we will have a compliant open access (OA) route for all papers published in Biochemical Society journals in 2025, completing our planned transformation to an OA publisher.
We made a pledge to create funder and institutionally compliant OA routes for all published articles to Plan S deadlines, and we are proud to share we have achieved this through four OA pathways, the fourth being Subscribe to Open to be implemented in 2025. Forces guiding the pace and method of our transition were:
- our strategic mission to ensure greater equity, diversity, and inclusion;
- actors within the scholarly communications landscape who set the agenda and provided guidance; organisations such as the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice, the Society Publishers Coalition, Jisc, CAUL and our many other consortia partners, ALPSP, UKRI, Wellcome, Plan S and more.
- our scientific community who sees value in producing and sharing results that (with more open data) are reproducible and readily accessible regardless of economic circumstances of region, institution, or career stage.
As a fully OA publisher, we will have greater means to promote discovery of our authors’ research, broadening dissemination globally, and continuing to deliver great publishing experiences for our authors. We commit to high standards of peer review and quality control, to best in industry production turnaround times, and to taking responsibility for the integrity of the scientific record.
We need financial stability, as do the institutions who support our work. As chair of Portland Press, Professor Nigel Hooper notes:
“Partnering with institutions and consortia to achieve fee-free OA for authors globally is a shared and mutual mission. The Biochemical Society (and its publishing arm, Portland Press) appreciate the ongoing financial support of many who are actively helping us to transition to a position where we can offer an OA route for all papers”.
Therefore, thank you to our library community, on whose support we depend. Publishing surpluses are gifted back to the Society, helping to fund scholars through grants and bursaries, to subsidise events and training, to create opportunities for our members at all stages of their career development. Our mission is to achieve a rich scientific culture based on accessible and trusted research for the advancement of the molecular biosciences.
