Biology Letters became a Plan S-compliant Transformative Journal in 2021 and is currently offering a discount on our article processing charge for manuscripts submitted before the end of March. In this post we discuss the journal’s open access journey and what happens next.
We’ve had many milestones throughout our short history and 2006 was a particularly important year for Biology Letters. We received our first Impact Factor score after launching only a year before. We also published our first open access paper, marking the start of our journey into open access. Fast forward to now and since 2021 we have committed to becoming a fully open access journal.
Becoming fully open access like our sister journals reinforces the overall mission of The Royal Society; to recognise, promote and support excellence in science. We have already put in place “Read and Publish” deals to help authors and institutions choose open access for their work. To help us further we have also introduced a temporary 50% discount on our article processing charge. If you submit a manuscript up to the end of March, the article processing charge for open access publishing in Biology Letters will be £850.
Authors of our Reviews and Editorials can also enjoy permanently free open access – that’s right, no article processing charges will be applied to authors of these article types (as well as authors of Corrections, Expressions of Concern and Retractions).
Beyond our open access options, there are many other reasons to submit to Biology Letters. Our short format is particularly good if you don’t need much space to unpack your ideas. We are particularly suitable for early career researchers too, as our word count may help develop a concise writing style as you begin publishing your work in journals.
Got an idea for a Review or even a Special Feature? Contact the editorial team and we will see how we can make this a reality. We’ve had many authors send in manuscript ideas from a talk they have given or a session they have run at a conference, and our Reviews Editor has some advice for your proposals in our recent blog post.
It’s been an important and disruptive few years for the science community recently and we hope that the future provides the stability we are all looking for. No matter what happens though, Biology Letters will go on as we started; being a home for great science that’s widely available to all. We cannot wait to work with you—our authors, peer reviewers, readers and Editorial Board Members—to make that happen.
To submit your manuscript please visit our submission page or visit our Information for Authors page. Feel free to email the editorial team with your queries on biologyletters@royalsociety.org.
Image credit: Photo by Philippe Donn from Pexels
