Author choices on Development: how ‘open’ are we to Open Access?

Plan S offers a number of routes by which a journal can be compliant with its policies, one of which is to become a ‘Transformative Journal’. The Company of Biologists has decided to take this option, and its three hybrid journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology) will move to Transformative Journal status from January 2021. Indeed, we are the first journals to be granted Transformative Journals status by cOAlition S. So what does this involve? As defined by Plan S, a Transformative Journal must commit to transitioning to full OA by gradually increasing its proportion of OA content and by offsetting income from OA fees against subscription income (something we have been doing for several years already). Importantly, Plan S recognises that high-quality publishing comes at a cost and requires that any fees charged must be commensurate with the services provided. To be Plan S compliant, a journal must also provide transparent metrics on both its pricing model and its editorial process (more on this below).

Clearly, this decision is important for those authors whose funders are part of Plan S, but we are committed to supporting all our authors and it's therefore important to reiterate that, as a Transformative Journal, we will continue to offer the same three routes to publication that we do now (outlined below). This means that, whatever your funder or financial status, you will still be able to publish your research in Development.

With this option, the author pays nothing at all. The article is available to our subscribers for 6 months and is then freely available to everyone after this time.

This option might appeal to authors whose funders and institutions do not mandate OA, and to authors who do not want (or are not able) to choose OA or pay an OA fee. This option could be important given the financial challenges expected in the research sector due to COVID-19.

The author will pay an article processing charge (APC) to publish their article as Gold OA. Articles will be published under a CC-BY licence, meaning they will be available to everyone immediately upon publication.

This option will appeal to authors whose funders or institutions mandate OA or to authors who prefer to publish as OA.

As one of our subscription options for 2020, we were able to include a Read & Publish (https://www.biologists.com/read-publish/) option for librarians – and were one of the first not-for-profit publishers to do so. These cost-neutral Read & Publish agreements give institutions the usual subscription access for their readers to all our journal content but also allow any corresponding authors from those institutions free and unlimited OA publication for all articles accepted for publication in Development and its sister journals Journal of Experimental Biology and Journal of Cell Science. As a completely new offering coming rather late in ‘renewal season’, most of our subscribers had already renewed their subscriptions, but three library consortia opted for the new model: Jisc for the UK, MALMAD for Israel and IReL for the Republic of Ireland. Having removed a financial barrier for these authors, we are already seeing more OA publications from these three countries. As we increase the number of institutions and library consortia opting for these deals, we expect to see an increase in the proportion of OA research content in our journals (see Fig. 1).

For more on these three publishing options, watch our short YouTube video (https://youtu.be/YqR_ejrMSkg) and, for further details about Transformative Journals, check out our FAQ for authors (https://www.biologists.com/transformative-journals/faq/).

As noted above, one of the requirements for Transformative Journals is an increase in transparency. We already provide article-specific metrics on usage, citations and online attention (altmetrics) for published articles. In future, we will also report on how these metrics compare for OA articles versus subscription content so that authors can make informed decisions over which publishing route to choose.

We are now also providing more transparent metrics about what authors should expect when they submit to our journals, such as decision times, acceptance rates and speed to publication: these can be found at https://dev.biologists.org/content/transparent-metrics. Some of these metrics are required by Plan S but we will, in time, add additional metrics that we think will be of interest to our journal communities.

At Development, we have always put the interests of our community at the heart of our publishing decisions – both in terms of providing valuable services to authors and in ensuring that income generated from their articles benefits the community through our charitable activities (for more details, see Box 1). Our provision of OA options is no different. It will be essential for some authors, of interest to others (especially if the financial barriers are removed by Read & Publish agreements) and of no concern whatsoever for others still. In line with our principles of transparency, we will keep you informed as our ‘transformative’ journey progresses; whatever the future of publishing may hold, you can rest assured that The Company of Biologists and its journals will remain committed to supporting its authors, reviewers and readers.

Note that near-identical Editorials have been published in Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology.