Epidemiology & Infection goes open access

"It is with these changes in mind that we are thrilled to announce that Epidemiology & Infection will convert to the OA model of publication starting from 1st January 2019. From that date, Epidemiology & Infection will publish all articles under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which permits use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The decision to flip Epidemiology & Infection from the subscription business model to the OA model was taken under the recognition that authors in this discipline are increasingly choosing to make their work available OA through a CC-BY license. A CC-BY license allows anyone anywhere in the world to read, use and cite the research, encouraging wider impact, collaboration and visibility. As a University Press, our priority is to focus on our authors and to provide the best quality journal to serve the community, regardless of the business model; however, it has become clear to us through recent analysis of papers published in Epidemiology & Infection that OA papers (published through the hybrid model) achieve greater downloads and become more highly cited. There is increasing evidence of this in other journals [4]. In tandem, an increasing number of our authors state that their funders want them to publish their output in gold OA, with some of those funders requiring their authors to publish only in fully gold OA journals. This is a trend we are seeing reflected across the scholarly communications landscape. Some institutes in Europe, and a few in the USA, have expressed support for the transformation of scholarly publishing from a subscription to an OA model. On 4th September 2018, a group of eleven European national research funders and the European Commission announced the formation of cOALition S to implement a bold new OA policy – Plan S [5], which includes 10 core principles. Together, these funders have made a commitment that by 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant OA journals or on compliant OA platforms. Plan S also states that the hybrid model is no longer compliant...."