Open Access Policy

Introduction

As a wholly owned subsidiary of the Biochemical Society, we are fully committed to the open science agenda, and to serving the needs of our authors, readers, researchers, society members and librarians. You can find the Biochemical Society’s policy on open scholarship here. Portland Press offers several open access (OA) options, including funder-compliant routes to publishing, in all of our journals.

There are two routes to making your work OA:

*Portland Press has adopted the ALPSP/NISO Recommended Practices for Journal Article Versions (the VoR and AM). A submitted manuscript under review that is accepted for publication becomes an Accepted Manuscript (AM) at the point of acceptance. A Proof that is corrected and published becomes a Version of Record (VoR). For further information, please click here.

Gold open access

All of our subscription journals offer authors the choice to pay a charge (article publishing charge or APC), allowing the final published article (the definitive Version of Record/VoR) to be published open access (OA). This makes the published article freely available online from the journal site and ensures that most types of distribution and re-use will be permitted without restrictions or charges.

Authors have the option to choose the Gold OA route for their manuscripts submitted to any of our subscription journals (hybrid OA). The below provides a quick overview on our hybrid OA offering.

We also publish two fully open access journals: Bioscience Reports and Neuronal Signaling.

Selection of Gold OA for a manuscript has no bearing whatsoever on the editorial decisions and the outcome of peer review. The decision to publish an article is governed entirely by the peer-review process and our Editors. The Journals’ Editors and Reviewers will not know whether an author has opted to pay for Gold OA. Payment to facilitate Gold OA is only collected after (if) a manuscript has been formally accepted for publication.

Portland Press open access overview:

¹Fees for Hybrid OA: Our Hybrid OA charges are £2,150; US$3,500; €2,590 per article. Discounted rates are £1,825; US$3,000; €2,200 and will apply if you are currently a member of the Biochemical Society. Note that Emerging Topics in Life Sciences (published on behalf of the Biochemical Society and the Royal Society of Biology) is a hybrid journal, however the OA charges are different to our other OA journals, and are shown in the table. Discounted rates for Emerging Topics in Life Sciences will apply if you are currently a member of the Biochemical Society or Royal Society of Biology.

Fees for Bioscience Reports: As this is a full OA journal, all articles follow the Gold OA route and carry a charge of £1,390; $1,960; € 1,650. Biochemical Society members are offered a discounted rate of £1,115; $1,570; € 1,325. Brief Report articles carry a discounted charge of £1,115; $1,570; € 1,325, further discounted to £840; $1,180; € 1,000 for Biochemical Society members. Charges are waived for invited articles.

Fees for Neuronal Signaling: As this is a full OA journal, all articles follow the Gold OA route and carry a charge of £1,250; US$2,225. Biochemical Society members are offered a discounted rate of £875; US$1,555. Charges are waived for invited articles.

²Licensing and permissions: Bioscience Reports and Neuronal Signaling, as full OA journals, publish all papers under a CC BY licence. For the hybrid journals, authors are able to select a CC BY licence if this is mandated by their funder. This licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon the published article, even commercially, as long as they credit the original article. This is the most accommodating of all the licences offered, and will be compliant with mandates and OA policies of funding bodies. Where a funder OA policy does not require publication under a CC BY licence, authors are offered the protective CC BY NC-ND licence for their OA articles. This licence allows unrestricted readership of the article while ensuring that commercial use and adaptations cannot be made without permission.

³Copyright: Authors of Portland Press journals retain copyright and assign us, the Publisher, an exclusive Licence to Publish. This is the case for all published articles regardless of whether they are OA or subscription articles. For all OA articles, the Licence to Publish assigned to us by Authors will point to the relevant Creative Commons licence (as described above) to guide use and re-use terms for readers and authors alike.

Waivers

To support and boost bioscience in the developing world, the Biochemical Society, and its publishing subsidiary Portland Press, go above and beyond the existing HINARI programme and offer either completely free or discounted Gold Open Access (OA) publication to authors from low-income countries.

• Waivers (free OA publication): Authors from 71 low-income countries (as defined by the HINARI 'Group A' list) can have their accepted papers published via Gold OA free of charge
• Discounts: Authors from a further 45 countries (on the HINARI 'Group B' list) can receive a discount on their article publishing charge (APC)
• Discounted rates for the Group B list are as per the 'special rates' described in the table above, namely: - £1825/$3000/€2200 for Hybrid OA in the following: Biochemical Journal, Clinical Science, Biochemical Society Transactions and Essays in Biochemistry - £1115/$1570/€1325 for Gold OA in the full OA journal, Bioscience Reports and £875/$1555 for Gold OA in the full OA journal, Neuronal Signaling

APCs are collected on behalf of Portland Press by the Copyright Clearance Center. Any applicable discounts will be automatically applied on the payment screen.

If there are any problems during payment, authors should email the Production Team for help.

Institutional Read & Publish Agreements

To support and accelerate our transition to Open Access, Portland Press offers transformative Read & Publish agreements, combining access to journal content with unlimited OA publishing.

For a list of our current Read & Publish institutional agreements, click here.

If you think that Read & Publish could benefit your institution please ask your librarian to get in touch.

Archiving policy & Green Open Access

Subscription articles: The final published Version of Record (VoR) for subscription articles may not be shared or posted to institutional repositories, personal webpages, blogs, listservs, ResearchGate or any other websites that are not password-protected. Authors are not normally permitted to share their articles (VoR) on any website that is open to the public. Please refer to our policy on the sharing of articles here.

Authors’ Accepted Manuscripts (AMs) can be archived in an institutional repository after an embargo of 12 months; however, this does not extend to subject repositories. See also Green Open Access (OA), below.

Green OA: Portland Press allows deposits for all Accepted Manuscripts in institutional repositories after an embargo period of 12 months.

Authors and librarians are invited to archive Accepted Manuscripts (not the final published PDF which is the definitive Version of Record of the article, but the manuscript that was accepted for publication following peer review) in institutional repositories, 12 months after publication of the VoR.

Funder exception: Deposits of the AM to subject repositories, such as PubMed Central, are only permitted if this is mandated by the funder. 

When archiving, please:

1. Make clear that this is not the final peer-reviewed Version of Record;
2. Include a link to the Version of Record on the journal website;
3. Ensure that the journal carrying the final published version of the article is attributed.
   
   
4. Archiving/sharing of Gold OA papers: As an APC will have been paid to make the final article OA, Authors (or indeed anyone) may share the final published PDF/Version of Record of Gold OA articles on any websites including blogs, personal pages, institutional repositories and subject archives. We encourage Authors and others to include a link to the published article on the journal page when re-posting, sharing or re-using an article (in whole or in part) elsewhere. Please check the licence of the published article as commercial re-use and adaptations will be subject to permissions in some cases.
   
   

Funders

By providing Gold open access (OA) publication of the final article (under a CC BY licence when this is mandated by a funder), and, for our hybrid journals, by allowing archiving of the accepted manuscript with 12-month embargoes, Portland Press facilitates funder-compliant routes to publication for several funders, including: 

• National Institutes of Health (NIH – USA)
• National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC – Australia)
• Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) 
• *UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), encompassing the Research Councils such as Medical
• Research Council (MRC) and National Environmental Research Council (NERC - UK)
• *Wellcome Trust (UK)
• Research Councils UK (RCUK - UK)
• Medical Research Council (MRC - UK)
• National Environmental Research Council (NERC - UK)
• Wellcome Trust (UK)
• Cancer Research UK (CRUK - UK)
• British Heart Foundation (BHF -UK)
• Charity Open Access Fund (COAF - UK)
  
  

*Both UKRI and Wellcome Trust are signed up to cOAlition S. Implementation guidelines issued by Plan S state a compliance date of 2021. It should be noted, however, that this refers to funding compliance alone and not publication. Any funding secured up to and including the full calendar year of 2020 will have no bearing on where associated research is then published. Hence, research may still be published in a ‘non-compliant’ journal in 2021, providing connected funding is secured prior to that time.

Data Policy

Portland Press and the Biochemical Society encourage authors to share their data and upload raw data and datasets to open data repositories on formal acceptance of their article for publication.