The Company of Biologists has announced a three-year Open Access agreement with the University of California (UC). This new cost-neutral transformative agreement – which runs from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2023 – covers Open Access publishing in The Company of Biologists’ three hybrid journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology) and two Open Access journals (Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open).
The agreement enables corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses to publish an uncapped number of research articles immediately Open Access. The agreement also provides researchers on all UC campuses with unlimited access to Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology and their archives dating back to 1853.
By combining funding from libraries with authors’ grant funds, this landmark agreement provides a model for how institutions in the United States can create a sustainable and inclusive path to full Open Access.
Under the agreement, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the Open Access fee, or article processing charge (APC), for all UC authors who choose to publish in one of The Company of Biologists’ journals. Authors are asked to pay the remainder if they have research funds available to do so. Authors who do not have research funds available can request full funding of the APC from the libraries. This ensures that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish Open Access in The Company of Biologists’ journals.
The agreement with UC is the first to be announced between The Company of Biologists and a library consortium in the United States. It follows recent agreements with the Max Planck Digital Library in Germany, Jisc in the UK, IReL in Ireland and MALMAD in Israel.
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