"The Microbiology Society’s Publish and Read has been a key tool in our teaching and research areas. It has improved accessibility of research outputs and by supporting Open Access it has increased citations of OA articles and helped raise our organisational profile." Macquarie University, Australia

Publish and Read is the Microbiology Society’s Transformative Agreement model, helping institutions to make the transition to an increasingly Open Access (OA) publishing landscape. Institutions that sign up for a Publish and Read agreement benefit from:

• Uncapped OA publishing: any article published in Society titles where the corresponding author is from a Publish and Read institution will be OA by default.
• Unlimited usage: any user associated with a Publish and Read institution can access the entire archive of Society content, back to 1947, for reading and for text and data mining.

Publish and Read is designed to provide a frictionless OA experience for authors and maximum value for institutions, with minimum administration. It offers institutions an alternative to both subscriptions and article processing charges (APCs).

Pricing

Pricing for Publish and Read is tiered. Pricing for new Publish and Read customers will be based on the institution’s FTE (“full-time equivalency”). This refers to the number of relevant science faculty and individuals* in each institution type. 

Renewing customers will remain on their existing tier.

The tiered pricing for Publish and Read for 2025 is as follows:

If you want to sign up or have any questions about Publish and Read, please contact [email protected].

* Relevant researchers are considered as those registered in doctoral (Ph.D, MD, or DVM, etc.) and postdoctoral programs in immunology, microbiology, pharmacology, biology, biochemistry, medicine (but not disciplines such as rehabilitation or nursing), veterinary medicine, biotechnology and related agriculture.

Consortia Publish and Read

We have signed national library consortia Publish and Read deals with:

We are keen to work with more consortia to offer the benefits of Publish and Read to their members. 

Please contact [email protected] to discuss Consortia Publish and Read deals.

How it works

"We are very pleased with the Microbiology Society’s Publish and Read deal. It not only reduces administration burdens for our librarians but also provides our researchers with transparency and a simple route to Open Access publishing". University of Birmingham, UK

We have made the Publish and Read author journey as straightforward as possible; this deck shows what to expect. 

Corresponding authors from Publish and Read institutions will be identified using their email domains. Where a corresponding author’s email domain matches that provided for a Publish and Read institution, we will ask the author to sign our standard CC-BY Creative Commons licence and will publish their article OA without further charge, and without embargo. 

Author identification

• Corresponding authors will be able to check their fee-free eligibility and then indicate the Publish and Read route for OA during the submission process.
• We check corresponding author eligibility as part of the submission and publication process using email domain names.
• The corresponding author's affiliation must match the paying institution on the date of acceptance. 
• Affiliation to a Publish and Read institution as stated in the accepted paper is the decisive parameter for eligibility. 
• Providing correct affiliation information (including an institutional email address) is the responsibility of corresponding authors.

Funding acknowledgement

• Funding acknowledgements must be provided by authors and will be included in the article XML for display in our current PDF and HTML formats, and any future format we introduce.
• Additionally, funding acknowledgement will be made to the corresponding author’s institution on the foot of each article as follows: ‘This article was made open access via a Publish and Read agreement between the Microbiology Society and the corresponding author’s institution’.

Reporting

Institutions can track their publishing output using a variety of routes and resources as described in detail on our Reporting page.

Metadata delivery

We follow NISO recommendations for ‘Mechanisms for Distributing Metadata’, which includes delivering metadata to Crossref and other relevant third parties; this includes Funder Registry metadata where it has been provided by the authors.

To assist customers with funder compliance, the following key dates will be detailed in reports to libraries:

• Date of acceptance: The point at which all necessary changes have been made following peer review and the author is notified that their output will be published.
• Date of publication: The date on which the article is published on microbiologyresearch.org.

Resources

To help institutions get the maximum benefit from our Publish and Read licence, the Microbiology Society has created digital resources to help librarians and OA managers to spread the word to faculty and inform potential authors of their eligibility.