The Max Planck Society is the latest organisation to sign-up to the Biochemical Society and Portland Press’ pilot Read & Publish transformative deal. The deal provides Max Planck researchers with unlimited open access (OA) publishing and ‘read’ access across the entire journal portfolio. The Max Planck Society joins more than 50 other institutions based around the world, from Tokyo to Texas, participating in this Read & Publish scheme.
Portland Press is the Biochemical Society’s publisher and its pilot Read & Publish scheme, offering unlimited OA publishing, first went live in 2020 as a means of making more of its published research and review articles openly available to researchers everywhere. The Read & Publish agreement guarantees all corresponding authors affiliated with the 86 Max Planck Institutes worldwide with OA publishing of their articles by default and at no additional author-facing charges.
The three-year deal, 2021-2023, repurposes former library subscription funds to support open access publishing, instead, ensuring a move away from the traditional subscription model towards a sustainable publishing model based on open dissemination of research.
Portland Press publishes seven journals covering different areas within molecular biology and the life sciences; two are fully OA titles and the other five hybrid journals in which content is usually published behind a paywall, with authors either choosing to pay an article publishing charge to have their work published OA or benefitting from default, charge-free OA publishing where their institution has signed up to a Read & Publish pilot.
To support and accelerate a transition to OA, these pilot Read & Publish deals provide an innovative alternative to the traditional subscription business model in scholarly publishing. The Biochemical Society and Portland Press are committed to a sustainable transition to a more open scholarly publishing landscape and the Read & Publish initiative builds on the principles set out in Open Scholarship position statement.
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