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This page contains information on the RVC’s transformative agreements and additional information on Open Access.  

For 2024, the RVC has agreements with: Elsevier, Microbiology Society, Portland Press, Royal Society, Wiley, PLOS, Company of Biologists, Springer, Cambridge University Press and Bioscientifica.

Information on APC funding for PeerJ journals can be found here

A list of the journals included in the 2024 agreements can be downloaded here (.xlsx file).

These agreements open up gold open access publishing opportunities to all corresponding authors with an RVC address, who are requested to upload their outputs to , where they will be discoverable on the .

A note on licences

If asked to choose a licence when submitting to a journal covered by a transformative agreement, please choose a CC BY licence if possible. This licence will be suitable for most articles. If your article contains particularly sensitive or restricted information, or other material you think it would be inappropriate to make freely available for reuse; then in this case a more restrictive licence would be the appropriate choice. More information about licences can be found .  

RVC’s Transformative Agreements

This section contains Elsevier, Microbiology Society, Portland Press, Royal Society, Wiley, PLOS, Company of Biologists, Cambridge University Press, Bioscientifica and Other RVC Plans & Open Access Memberships.

Transformative Agreements mean that authors can make their work gold open access through our agreements with publishers, which cover both subscription to the content of journals and the cost associated with gold open access publishing.

The RVC has joined the following Transformative Agreements to facilitate the shift of scholarly research to immediate open access.

Elsevier

Elsevier Read and Publish 2022-2024.

The agreement provides Open Access publishing in Core Hybrid, Cell Press and The Lancet titles and Read Access to existing ScienceDirect and Cell Press Journals.

It also provides a discount on OA publishing in Elsevier's portfolio of fully open access titles.

However, for many Cell Press and Lancet titles this deal does not cover review articles.

The list of titles covered can be found . 

This agreement also gives a 15% discount on APC's related to journals listed .

Microbiology Society

Microbiology Society Publish & Read Transitional Agreement 2023-2024.

An unlimited Publish and Read transitional agreement covering the full Microbiology Society portfolio of three hybrid and three full OA journals.

This includes the following journals: -

International Journal of Systemic and Evolutionary Microbiology

Journal of General Virology

Journal of Medical Microbiology

Microbiology

Microbial Genomics

Access Microbiology

Where a corresponding author has an RVC email address, the Microbiology Society will ask the author to sign a CC BY  and will publish their article gold open access.

Details of the 'author journey' have been provided by the Society .

Portland Press

Portland Press Read and Publish Transitional Agreement 2024-25.

Portland Press Read and Publish Agreement provides Jisc members access to the five-journal package, including all Portland Press hybrid journals and unlimited APC-free, OA publishing in all seven Portland Press journals: five hybrid plus two full-OA journals. New for 2024, Jisc members will have access to the full archive for the duration of the agreement.

These journals are as follows: -

Biochemical Journal

Clinical Science

Biochemical Society Transactions

Essay in Biochemistry

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences

Bioscience Reports

Neuronal Signalling

Royal Society 

Royal Society Journals Read and Publish Transitional Agreement 2024.

A Read and Publish transitional agreement for the Royal Society's full journals package of eight hybrid and two open access journals, including unlimited read access and uncapped open access publishing.

This includes the following journals: -

Philosophical Transactions A

Philosophical Transactions B

Proceedings A

Proceedings B

Biology Letters

Interface

Interface Focus

Notes & Records

Open Biology

Open Science

Download the author journey  for Open Biology, our fully open access journal dedicated to cell and molecular biology.

Download the author journey  for Royal Society Open Science, our fully open access journal covering all of science.

Download the , Proceedings A, Proceedings B, Biology Letters, Interface and Notes and Records.

Wiley 

The Wiley Jisc Read and Publish agreement combines open access publishing and full and permanent access to ~1,635 Wiley journals for the period 2020 to 2023.

Corresponding authors at the RVC can publish gold open access in Vet Record, In Practice, Vet Record Open and Vet Record Case Reports. 

A full list of journals included can be found from the download link at the top of this page. Additional information about the journals included in the agreement can be found .

Use Wiley’s , selecting a CC BY licence when prompted. 

For guidance when submitting articles contact publicationsrepos@rvc.ac.uk 

Jisc's white paper 'Monitoring the transition to open access: Jisc-Wiley transitional agreement' is available to read , supplemented by a .

PLOS

PLOS OA Tiered Flat Fee publishing 2024.

Jisc members pay an annual flat fee (based on historic publishing trend with PLOS from 2016-2020) for unlimited publishing in seven PLOS journals

The journals covered are: -

PLOS Computational Biology

PLOS Pathogens

PLOS Genetics

PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases

PLOS ONE

PLOS Digital Health

PLOS Complex Systems

The Company of Biologists

The Company of Biologists Read and Publish 2022-2024.

An unlimited Read and Publish Transitional Agreement covering the three Company of Biologists' hybrid journals and two open access journals.

These journals are: -

Development

Journal of Cell Science

Journal of Experimental Biology

Biology Open 

Disease Models and Mechanisms

Follow this  for advice on the submission process.

As a not-for-profit publisher, The Company of Biologists uses its surplus income for the benefit of biology and the biological community,  that support and encourage the sharing of knowledge throughout the community by facilitating international collaboration, event attendance and the organisation of scientific meetings, conferences and workshops.

Springer

Springer Nature Read and Publish 2023-2025

The Springer Nature Read and Publish 2023-2025 agreement brings together Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, and Nature Research journals into one Read and Publish agreement. 

More information can be found 

As with all our agreements, and in line with best practice, articles must be published with a CC BY licence.

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Read and Publish 2024

This is a read and publish transitional OA agreement. This covers CUP complete collection (includes new and take over titles per annum/latest collection).

Animal Welfare is covered by this agreement.

A full publishing list can be found 

Bioscientifica

Read and Publish 2024

This is a read and publish transitional agreement offering unlimited open access publishing for Bioscientifica's four hybrid journals:

Journal of Endocrinology

Journal of Molecular Endocrinology

Endocrine-Related Cancer

Reproduction

Published on behalf of two learned societies: Society for Endocrinology and Society for Reproduction and Fertility.

Other RVC Plans & Open Access Memberships

Peer J

PeerJ funding is available from our institutional plan to pay for Basic Memberships. Memberships last for life and allow you to publish one article per year in PeerJ, as long as all authors on a paper have a Membership. Please claim for your membership on this page when your article has been accepted for publication and complete the email verification:

The  on paid memberships and APCs is helpful.

Please direct any queries relating to these topics to publicationsrepos@rvc.ac.uk

Additional information on Open Access

This section contains, Diamond Open Access, Predatory Journals, Open Research, Tools for Accessing Open Research, Plan S and Rights Retention Strategy.

Diamond Open Access

In addition to utilising transformative agreements, researchers can also publish their work with immediate open access for free in a variety of journals known as 'diamond journals'. These journals are based on scholarly publishing models that are sustained cooperatively and seek to focus on non-profit publishing.

These can be browsed and assessed for suitability on the , using the filter 'Without article processing charges (APCs)'. For journals to be listed in DOAJ, they must register and meet  relating to open access. 

This approach is thriving in Latin America in particular. More details can be found via: -

- journal 

 - journal 

Predatory Journals

To help decide appropriate journals for your work, the site  provides a range of useful .  continue to be a challenge to be mindful of and work is ongoing to develop a Journal Authenticator tool. Some advice for researchers may be found .

Open Research

Recent events have underscored the need for .

, transitional agreements and Read and Publish deals are all terms that effectively refer to the same concept. This concept is immediate open access of research. Transformative agreements are contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers. Negotiations are mostly conducted by . They aim to transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing. Moving from one based on toll access (subscription), to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services. These agreements will help to create the necessary preconditions for systemic change in scholarly communication.

To facilitate learning about Open Research, Christopher Eaker developed the Open Research Toolkit, which takes a detailed look at open research concepts and skills. The Toolkit would be useful for anyone interested in learning more about open research. Videos can be found , with their corresponding slides available to download .

Tools for Accessing Open Research

 (now part of )

Plan S

Plan S states

“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”

Transformative Agreements arose in response to , a policy announced in  by a group of research funding organisations (), which aims to expedite the transition to full and immediate OA to research publications and challenges publishers to move away from the hybrid (subscription) business model. Plan S seeks to develop a better understanding of the publishing landscape and the options available to researchers to share their research findings immediately and openly. The group behind Plan S, cOAlition S, commissioned an  that seeks to contribute to this understanding. They also keep an official blog, the , concerning initiatives and opinions relating to the implementation of the plan.

Although many RVC researchers are not funded by cOAlition S organisations, the effects of Plan S will be increasingly discernible because more publishers will offer Transformative Agreements to institutions. These are often more cost effective to sign up to, when compared to paying the costs for gold open access and subscription deals separately. These deals are referred to as transitional agreements because the publishers behind them commit to moving towards publishing only fully open access journals. The initial date for publishers to change their business models by ‘flipping’ to immediate open access only was at the end of 2024. However, cOAlition S have now said that only funding for transformative agreements will end on this date – they have compiled some .

Their FAQs on rights and licences gives advice on using the .

Rights Retention Strategy

To support academics in retaining their rights, cOAlition S have developed the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS). A webinar on this topic, which gives a useful breakdown of the aims and practicalities of the initiative is given below.

Plan S Rights Retention Strategy - myth busting online event: 

Wellcome funded researchers are now required to include the following wording in the manuscripts they submit to journals, in order to protect their intellectual rights:

“This research was funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.”

This can be easily amended for researchers funded by other bodies or for unfunded researchers. By default, copyright resides with the creator. So, if you wish to retain your rights you are able to.

Stephen Eglen, Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Cambridge University provides has developed a . Adopting this language and supporting this initiative will help make more work immediately accessible to all. As this strategy can be used in the eventuality of funds not being available to pay for gold open access. Further background on the development of this policy can also be found in cOAlition S's , signed by many ECR's in response to some of their .