As a membership charity and independent publisher, the Microbiology Society supports sustainable Open Access (OA) models which maintain the scholarly publishing environment that is fundamental to how microbiologists improve, validate and share their research.

By publishing OA, you benefit from:

• higher visibility;   
• greater discoverability;   
• share and reuse options;   
• funder compliance.

We offer various routes to OA across the entire Society portfolio of journals.

Gold (immediate) OA of the Version of Record

Gold OA allows authors to make published articles immediately available online under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence. 

We offer two routes to Gold OA: 

1. Fee-free OA is the default for corresponding authors whose institutions have a Publish and Read licence, see list of eligible institutions here.
2. An Article Processing Charge (APC) will be made if you opt for Gold OA, unless your institution has a Publish and Read licence. APC rates can be found here.

Gold OA is an option in our hybrid journals: Journal of General Virology, Journal of Medical Microbiology and International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, and is mandatory in Microbiology, Microbial Genomics and Access Microbiology.

Green OA: articles before submission

A 'preprint' is an early version of the scientific article that has not been through peer review before being posted online. The Microbiology Society encourages authors to deposit a preprint either in their institutional repository or in the preprint server bioRxiv. Our journals accept direct submissions from bioRxiv, ensuring a quick and easy submission process, but if you choose to use a different server please provide a clear link to the preprint in the submission form.

If your article is accepted, we ask that you update your preprint to include a link to the final published article, known as the Version of Record. The link should read:

'© [name of Author(s), year]. The definitive peer reviewed, edited version of this article is published in [name of Journal, volume, issue, year, DOI].'

Green OA: accepted articles

An Author-Accepted Manuscript (AAM) is the accepted version of a scientific article, which includes modifications based on reviewers’ suggestions but has not been copyedited or typeset. The Microbiology Society encourages authors to deposit their AAM either in their institutional repository or in a recognised subject repository such as PubMed Central. Authors are entitled to deposit their AAM on the day of publication (sometimes called ‘embargo-free’), under a CC-BY licence: this complies with all funder and institutional mandates. When depositing your AAM, please include an archiving statement on the title page and include a link to the final published article, known as the Version of Record. The statement should read:

'© [name of Author(s), year]. The definitive peer reviewed, edited version of this article is published in [name of Journal, volume, issue, year, DOI].'

Authors who wish to provide a translated abstract, or a full translation of their work, before depositing their AAM may do so, provided a link to the Version of Record is included in the translation.