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Everybody’s at it.

This time, it’s the turn of the venerable Company of Biologists—a Cambridge-based “non-profit organization whose objectives are the advancement and promotion of research in, and the study of, all branches of biology”. They publish a number of well-respected titles, including Development, Journal of Experimental Biology and one of my all-time favourites, the Journal of Cell Science. As with most learned societies, their journals are pay-to-view. The money goes back into the activities of the Company, such as funding travel grants for PhD students.

They’ve now taken a bold step into the Open Access world, announcing Biology Open, an online-only journal launching in September and accepting manuscripts now. Biology Open “aims to provide rapid peer-reviewed publication for good-quality scientifically sound observations in these allied fields.” The strength of the new journal appears to be based on the rapidity of peer review, and, reading between the lines, acceptance of any paper that is technically sound (rather like the intentions of PLoS ONE):

The impact of each paper will be decided by the community itself through usage and discussion.

Which is interesting, to say the least. I’m wondering if they’ll take notice of F1000 evaluations of their articles… and, strikingly, “the journal also encourages the submission of useful reports of negative results.”

I’m not entirely sure how they plan to reduce “reviewer fatigue,” but we’re going to watch this one with interest. Being open access, there will be a fee for each accepted article, currently set at US$1350. This covers “peer review, journal production, and online systems employed for the purposes of submitting, trafficking, hosting and archiving articles” and can be totally or partially waived for those who can’t afford it. Editors and peer reviewers won’t know about fee payment status of the authors, which is necessary but good to see it being made explicit.

The only downside I can see is that submissions must be made as PDFs: on the one hand that’s great for portability and getting manuscripts out to review, but raises the question of how the manuscript will then be marked up and provided online. Peter Murray-Rust might have some things to say about PDFs.

We at F1000 look forward to seeing what Biology Open (also on twitter) has to offer, and wish them the very best. I’m sure our F1000 Members are equally excited.

[UPDATE: With respect to reviewer fatigue, I’ve just realized that the About page does touch on this. It appears that a manuscript bounced from one of CoB’s other journals for not being exciting enough or otherwise appropriate, but still technically OK, can go to Biology Open together with its reviewers’ reports. There’s a danger that Biology Open (hmm. Must resist calling it ‘BO’) will thus be seen as J Cell Sci Rejects, but apart from that it’s a good idea.]