Open science
Open by default, where we can afford it
Three of our six journals are fully open access and charge authors nothing. The other three are hybrid, and we would rather say so than describe ourselves as an open access publisher and hope nobody checks.
Fundamentals
Open science means opening every output of research, not only the paper at the end of it: the data, the code, the protocols, the preprint and, where everyone consents, the peer review itself.
The benefit that matters most is not philosophical. Work that can be read can be checked, and work that can be checked is work whose errors get found — including by the people who wrote it. Almost every other argument for open science is downstream of that one.
Routes to open access
- Gold — published open
- The version of record is free to read on this platform from the day it is published, under a CC BY or CC BY-NC licence. Three of our journals are gold throughout and charge nothing.
- Hybrid — open within a subscription journal
- An individual article made open in a journal that is otherwise subscription. Available in our three hybrid titles for a published APC, with waivers as below.
- Green — self-archived
- You may deposit the accepted manuscript in your institutional or subject repository immediately on acceptance, with no embargo, whatever route the article took here. This applies to subscription articles too.
- Diamond — open, and free to authors
- Free to read and free to publish. Our three open access journals are diamond, funded from Lighthouse's trade list rather than from author charges.
Funding & waivers
- Automatic country waivers
- Corresponding authors based in low-income and lower-middle-income economies pay no APC. Applied at acceptance without an application, and never counted against an institutional agreement.
- Discretionary waivers
- For anyone else who cannot pay. Requests go to the managing editor and are decided after the editorial decision, by different people, from a file the handling editor does not see.
- Institutional agreements
- If your institution has a read-and-publish agreement with us, your APC is covered under it. The platform tells you at acceptance rather than leaving you to find out.
- Funder compliance
- Our licences and self-archiving terms comply with the major funder mandates. If yours has a requirement we do not meet, tell us — we have changed terms for this before.
- Book OA funding
- Institutional and funder support can make a specific monograph open access. The supporter is acknowledged on the book's page.
Agreements
Transformative agreements cover an institution's reading access and its authors' open access publishing in one fee. We publish the list of institutions we have agreements with, and the terms are not confidential — an arrangement whose price cannot be disclosed is one the parties expect to be embarrassed by.
Data, code & protocols
- Availability statements are required
- On every research article. 'Available on request' is accepted only with a named contact who has agreed in writing to be it — the phrase is otherwise a well-documented way of saying no.
- Data repositories
- Deposit in a recognised repository and cite the DOI in your article. We link the two so a reader reaches the data in one click.
- Code
- Code underlying a published analysis should be deposited with a version tag and a licence. We ask for it at submission and publish it alongside accepted papers.
- Protocols
- Methods detailed enough to repeat, published as citable protocols so the method gets credited separately from the finding that used it.
- When data cannot be shared
- Consent, confidentiality, indigenous data sovereignty and genuine commercial constraint are all real. Say which applies and what a reader could do instead.
Preprints
Posting a preprint before or during submission is welcome at every journal on this platform and has never counted against a submission here. Cite the preprint's DOI in your cover letter so the reviewers know it exists.
On acceptance we ask you to update the preprint with a link to the version of record, so the two records point at each other rather than competing in search results.
Transparent peer review
Review is double-anonymous by default. Where both the author and the reviewer opt in, the reports and the author's responses are published alongside the article, signed.
We do not make this the default, and the reason is uncomfortable: in a small field, a junior reviewer signing a critical report of a senior author's work is taking a career risk that we cannot carry for them. Until that is less true, opt-in is the honest setting.
Glossary
- APC
- Article processing charge. A fee paid at acceptance to make an article open access. Not a submission fee, and never a condition of acceptance.
- Version of record
- The final, copy-edited, typeset article with its DOI — the version that should be cited.
- Accepted manuscript
- Your post-review, pre-typesetting version. This is the one you may deposit in a repository immediately.
- CC BY
- A licence allowing anyone to reuse and adapt the work, including commercially, provided they credit you.
- CC BY-NC
- The same, but excluding commercial reuse. More restrictive, and not accepted by every funder — check yours.
- Embargo
- A delay between publication and when a version may be made freely available. We do not impose one.
- Transformative agreement
- An institutional contract combining reading access with open access publishing in a single fee.
