15 March 2023 – EMBO announces that on 1 January 2024 The EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports will switch from encouraging Open Access (OA) publication to applying Open Access to all published papers. In addition, all research papers published in all EMBO Press journals will include the source data underlying the figures as well as data availability sections. Data- and preprint-citation will be encouraged.
“With the full conversion of all its journals to Open Access, EMBO is taking a major step in promoting Open Science for the benefit of the individual researchers, and also for institutions and funders,” says Fiona Watt, EMBO Director. “The switch will help to advance the global discoverability, transparency and availability of published research outcomes,” she adds.
With the move, all EMBO Press journals will comply with the Open Science policies of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the European Research Council (ERC) / Horizon Europe and CoalitionS / PlanS. Universities, research institutions and funders worldwide are increasingly adopting Open Science policies to remove restrictions to the access to publicly funded data and papers.
The papers published in EMBO Press journals will be made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY license, which allows anyone to reuse, share, or build upon the publications with appropriate citation.
“Over the last decade, the EMBO Press journals have spearheaded key Open Science and transparency initiatives which have been adopted by other journals,” says Bernd Pulverer, Head of Scientific Publishing. “We have started to encourage OA already eighteen years ago, but full OA and the inclusion of curated source data in all figures is an important step towards our larger Open Science vision,” Pulverer comments. “We are aware high-quality publishing services can incur considerable costs for those authors who are not yet covered by dedicated publication funds. We will ensure EMBO Press journals will remain accessible to all authors,” he adds.
Molecular Systems Biology from the EMBO Press suite of journals was launched as one of the world’s first OA journals in 2005. In 2012, EMBO Molecular Medicine was one of the first highly selective journals to convert to full OA. Life Science Alliance, co-published with Rockefeller University Press and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, launched as an OA journal in 2019.
Payment for OA publication is made by the authors, or by the authors’ institutions or funders, who pay an article processing charge (APC) on acceptance of the article for publication. APCs for Open Access publication in the EMBO Press journals will be announced in late 2023.
EMBO Press has been a major innovator in scientific publishing since its inception. The transparent and consultative peer review policies support constructive and effective peer review for over a decade: the journals publish referee comments, author responses and editorial decision letters in full alongside each paper; referee are invited to comment on each other’s reports and, where appropriate, editors take into account the author’s comments in referee reports before making decision and support them during revision. The source data in EMBO Press journals are enhanced by a free service to curate and annotate figures. It enables direct search for data and experiments via the EMBO SourceData platform, making the papers and their data better findable. Review Commons, the preprint peer-review platform, associates referee reports with the corresponding preprints and facilitates seamless transfer of peer-reviewed preprints to 17 partner journals, accelerating publication by avoiding repetitive rounds of peer review and resubmission.
