The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publishing organisation with a mission to support biologists and inspire biology worldwide.

They have a long-standing commitment to Open Access as they believe it benefits science.

Their hybrid journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology – were the first journals in the world from any publisher to be afforded Transformative Journal status by Plan S. They were also one of the first not-for-profit publishers to launch a Read & Publish initiative.

Further information is available on the Company of Biologists' CAUL agreement site.

Included titles

This agreement allows authors from participating institutions to publish open access in all five titles with no transactional APCs.

Eligible Journals

• Development
• Journal of Cell Science
• Journal of Experimental Biology
• Disease Models and Mechanisms
• Biology Open

Eligible articles

Article types

Open access publishing covered under this Read & Publish agreement includes the following article types:

• Original research paper article

Authors may publish excluded article types as “closed access” or pay an article processing charge (if applicable) to make the article open access.

Acceptance date

Eligible articles that have an acceptance date during the term of this agreement are eligible to be published open access under the terms of the agreement.

Number of included articles

There is no limit on the number of articles by eligible authors from participating institutions that can be published under the terms of this agreement.

Other charges

There are no other transactional charges for authors.

Responsible corresponding authors from institutions listed under 'Participating institutions' above may publish immediately to open access on the publisher's platform once the article has been accepted with no transactional APCs. (Page and colour charges may apply.)

Author rights

Articles from authors at participating institutions may be published under the authors' choice of either 

• CC-BY 
• CC-BY-SA 
• CC-BY-ND 
• CC-BY-NC 
• CC-BY-NC-SA 
• CC-BY-NC-ND

The Creative Commons licenses allow reuse (some with conditions) while protecting the authors' rights of acknowledgment as authors. Authors retain copyright. 

How to submit your article for open access publishing

1. Follow the publisher's usual article submission process via the journal’s homepage.
2. On acceptance of the article, the publisher will ask the corresponding author to complete a form (publishing agreement). 
3. The corresponding author selects open access and confirms the licence type (e.g. CC-BY). 
4. The APC is automatically waived for authors who have used an institutional email address belonging to one of the participating institutions and indicated they are affiliated with a participating institution. 

View the publisher’s step-by-step guide for authors. 

Author identification

Authors will be identified as eligible for open access publishing by their  

• email address 
• institutional affiliation 
• IP address range. 

Authors must use their institutional email address when submitting an article for publication in order for the publication to be approved to be published open access with no transactional APCs .

Responsible corresponding authors should not use personal email addresses (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail). Doing so may result in delayed approval of the article or the article may not be approved to be published open access under the terms of the agreement.