The Microbiology Society is a not-for-profit publisher. Publish and Read is our Transformative Agreement model, supporting institutions in an increasingly Open Access (OA) publishing landscape. Institutions that sign up for a Publish and Read agreement benefit from:

• Fee-free OA publishing: corresponding authors at institutions with a Publish and Read agreement can publish OA with no article charges in any title covered by their agreement. 
• Comprehensive access: any user affiliated with a Publish and Read institution can access all content included in their institution’s agreement for reading and for text and data mining. 

Publish and Read is designed to provide a frictionless OA experience for authors and maximum value for institutions, with minimum administration. It offers institutions an alternative to both subscriptions and article processing charges (APCs) for included titles. A full list of Publish and Read institutions can be found here.

Check if your institution has a Publish and Read agreement and what titles are included using our Institutional Agreement checker tool.

Pricing

Publish and Read Essential 

Our standard Publish and Read agreement covers our six most established titles: Access Microbiology, International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, Journal of General Virology, Journal of Medical Microbiology, Microbial Genomics and Microbiology. 

Pricing for Publish and Read is tiered. Pricing for new Publish and Read customers will be based on the institution’s FTE (“full-time equivalency”). This refers to the number of relevant science faculty and individuals* in each institution type. Renewing customers will remain on their existing tier. 

The tiered pricing for Publish and Read Essential for 2026 is as follows: 

* Relevant researchers are considered as those registered in doctoral (Ph.D, MD, or DVM, etc.) and postdoctoral programs in immunology, microbiology, pharmacology, biology, biochemistry, medicine (but not disciplines such as rehabilitation or nursing), veterinary medicine, biotechnology and related agriculture.

If you want to sign up or have any questions about Publish and Read, please contact [email protected].

Publish and Read Complete

Institutions can also opt to include our newest titles – Microbiology Horizons and Microbiology Outlooks – in their agreement, known as Publish and Read Complete. To find out more about options and pricing, please contact [email protected].

Consortia Publish and Read

We have signed national library consortia Publish and Read deals with:

We are keen to work with more consortia to offer the benefits of Publish and Read to their members. 

Please contact [email protected] to discuss Consortia Publish and Read deals.

How it works

We have made the Publish and Read author journey as straightforward as possible; this workflow shows what to expect. 

Corresponding authors from Publish and Read institutions will be identified using their email domains. Where a corresponding author’s email domain matches that provided for a Publish and Read institution, we will ask the author to sign our standard CC-BY Creative Commons licence and will publish their article OA without further charge, and without embargo. 

Author identification

• Corresponding authors will be able to check their fee-free eligibility and then indicate the Publish and Read route for OA during the submission process.
• We check corresponding author eligibility as part of the submission and publication process using email domain names.
• The corresponding author's affiliation must match the paying institution on the date of acceptance. 
• Affiliation to a Publish and Read institution as stated in the accepted paper is the decisive parameter for eligibility. 
• Providing correct affiliation information (including an institutional email address) is the responsibility of corresponding authors.

Funding acknowledgement

• Funding acknowledgements must be provided by authors and will be included in the article XML for display in our current PDF and HTML formats, and any future format we introduce.
• Additionally, funding acknowledgement will be made to the corresponding author’s institution on the foot of each article as follows: ‘This article was made open access via a Publish and Read agreement between the Microbiology Society and the corresponding author’s institution’.

Reporting

Institutions can track their publishing output using a variety of routes and resources as described in detail on our Reporting page.

Metadata delivery

We follow NISO recommendations for ‘Mechanisms for Distributing Metadata’, which includes delivering metadata to Crossref and other relevant third parties; this includes Funder Registry metadata where it has been provided by the authors.

To assist customers with funder compliance, the following key dates will be detailed in reports to libraries:

• Date of acceptance: The point at which all necessary changes have been made following peer review and the author is notified that their output will be published.
• Date of publication: The date on which the article is published on microbiologyresearch.org.

Resources

To help institutions get the maximum benefit from their Publish and Read agreement, the Microbiology Society has created promotional resources to help librarians and faculty to spread the word and inform potential authors of their eligibility.