Microbiology goes Open Access
The opening of 2023 marks a significant event in the history of the Microbiology Society, with the transitioning of its flagship and oldest scientific journal, Microbiology , to full Open Access (OA). While our sister journal Microbial Genomics has been OA since it started, this is the first of the Society’s long-established journals that is ‘flipping’ to OA.
arm of the Society: your membership fees only constitute a tiny proportion of the Society’s income. We in the journal leadership team have known this for many years and have been working hard to increase the visibility and reputation of Microbiology . Now we need you as members to help us, and there are two clear ways to do this. The first is that if you are working in an institution or organisation that is not signed up to P&R to lobby them to consider signing up. Pricing is tiered so that the conversion to P&R is as cost neutral as possible; for instance, at Tier 1, the lowest tier, the P&R deal is effectively paid back from the first OA article authors publish in Society journals that year. That is in any of our journals, right across the portfolio of microbiology, including our new journal Microbiology Access , which has open peer review and a focus on publishing all robust research data. The second, and single most important thing you can do as a member, is then to publish in our journals and encourage others to do the same. We will always need to publish, but let’s think a little more about where we publish and where the profits from those activities end up. Publish OA with us. Increase your impact. Expand your reach. Support your community. “ I’m delighted that my institution has signed up to P&R. It’s a requirement of my funder, but also a point of principle, that we publish our work open access. I know I can submit our manuscript to any of the Society’s journals without needing to have discussions with my line manager or librarian either before or, more awkwardly, after submission about how we might cover an article processing charge. Frank Sargent (Newcastle University, UK)
Claudio Ventrella/iStock
T here is nothing worse than putting your heart into a piece of written work, for it to be published, but then for hardly anyone to be able to read it due to a paywall and for its impact to not be truly realised. With the switch to OA and our Publish & Read (P&R) deals available from the Microbiology Society it is now easier than ever to publish in our journals so that your research and ideas can be heard. The advantages of your paper being published in an OA journal are clear. Its visibility is assured, meaning more people can read and download your paper, from a much wider audience, leading to more opportunity for citation as shown in the figure below. This wider inclusivity for readers outside traditional ‘subscription’ institutions is a massive benefit. The Society also removes the cost barrier for authors from countries covered by Research4Life to publish OA for free to promote their fields across the globe. For authors in neither P&R nor Research4Life institutions, you can pay the article processing charge (APC). While this is clearly the right thing to do, it is not without its risks for the Society. You may not be aware how dependent the Society is on income from journal subscriptions, which are now being replaced by our pioneering P&R model. It is critical that P&R is successful for the Society to continue to function as a charity supporting the science of microbiology in the UK and beyond. Annual Conference, grants, policy activities and much more are all supported primarily through the publishing
Visibility of OA articles
Usage and citations are key indicators of the impact of research articles: on average these metrics increased when published OA by the following factors.
Gavin Thomas Editor-in-Chief, Microbiology
Based on averages in all journals with citation data from Web of Science
75 Microbiology Today October 2022 | microbiologysociety.org
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