Publishing mission

At the heart of what we do are our five specialist journals. All are edited by expert researchers in the field, and all articles are subjected to rigorous peer review. We take great pride in the experience of our editorial team and the quality of the work we publish.

The Company of Biologists is a mission-driven not-for-profit publishing organisation dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community world-wide. It is run by distinguished practising scientists.

We exist to profit science, not shareholders.

Despite our relatively small size, we are innovators in the way we do things: we were among the first to embrace preprints by offering an easy transfer option between our journals and bioRxiv and by introducing preLights, a community-led preprint highlighting service. We take equity and diversity very seriously. We continually seek to improve publishing policy and practice.

Open Access publishing

We have offered Open Access publishing options since 2004 and two of our five journals - Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open - are already fully Open Access. We believe that Open Access is the direction of travel and it is clear that, as well as reader benefits, Open Access provides our authors with a wider readership and higher usage for their articles.

Our three hybrid journals - Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology - have chosen the 'transformative' route towards Open Access. As the first journals to be afforded Transformative Journal status by Plan S, we are excited about this next step in our Open Access journey. The Transformative Journal strategy signals more clearly our commitment to move towards full Open Access, while allowing us to provide publishing options that support all our authors as we approach this change in the publishing landscape.

This helps us balance these two priorities:

making research accessible to everyone, as quickly as possible
supporting our whole author community - whatever their funder or financial status

We were also one of the first not-for-profit journal publishers to launch a cost-neutral Read & Publish initiative, offering libraries and library consortia unlimited “read” access to our subscription journals plus uncapped fee-free Gold Open Access publishing of research articles under a single agreement.

Grants

We use the surplus we generate for the benefit of biology and the biological community, by providing a range of grants to societies, meetings and researchers.

Meetings

We organise Journal Meetings and Workshops to support the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary ideas and networking within and between our communities.

Community

Supporting the biological community is a common thread running through all of our activities. Our publishing policies are set with our whole author base in mind and we regularly seek feedback from a wider range of authors, reviewers and readers. Our journals support meetings and conferences in their respective fields, by offering sponsorships, contributing to editorial panels or publishing meeting reviews.

We are particularly keen to support the next generation of biologists and to this end various opportunities are available to early-career researchers. Several of our journals offer interviews with up-and-coming biologists and first authors, to showcase their research and the stories behind their papers. Fellowship grants are available for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers making collaborative visits to other laboratories. And funded places are available at all of our Workshops.

We engage actively with our community through our social media channels and our three community sites.

The Node is the community site for and by developmental biologists. It is a place to read, write and interact with a global community of developmental and stem cell biologists. Covering a wide range of resources, anyone can contribute to this site by posting blog posts, job ads and event notices. The site also incorporates the Node Network, a global directory of developmental and stem cell biologists, designed to help you find speakers, referees, panel members and potential collaborators.

preLights is the preprint highlights service run by the biological community and supported by The Company of Biologists. Our dedicated team of scientists from the community select, highlight and comment on preprints they feel are of particular interest to the biological community. This not only helps the wider community navigate the ever-increasing preprint landscape, but it also offers early-career researchers valuable writing experience and networking opportunities.

FocalPlane is a trusted online meeting place to connect people, products, resources and information from the microscopy community. Hosted by Journal of Cell Science, and featuring news, interviews, tools, job listings, events, a regular journal club and blog series, the community site is free to access and users can register for a free account to post their own contributions. We encourage you to make FocalPlane part of your online routine. Read, post, comment and get involved.

We look forward to working with you and hope that you will join us by sending us some of your best work.