Shifting towards an Open Science future

October 20th, 2020

In recognition of the need for science to be open and accessible, we support various Open Access models and initiatives to help our authors reach the broadest audience for their work.

Collage of the covers of all 27 journals published by CSIRO Publishing

The Open Science movement seeks to make scientific research accessible to all, to enable greater knowledge-sharing, collaboration and support increased impact from the world’s research output. While we look towards an Open Science future, we already have a number of initiatives in place that will contribute to this goal.

Research4Life

Research4Life (external link) provides institutions in lower income countries with online access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content. They aim to improve teaching, research and policy-making in health, agriculture, the environment and other life, physical and social sciences.

Since 2002 researchers at more than 10,000 institutions in over 120 low- and middle-income countries have been provided with free or low-cost online access to journal content. We enable access to all Research4Life programs for journals we publish.

Open Access

As a scholarly publisher within a scientific institution, we appreciate the value researchers gain from openly available publications. We offer four Open Access models which comply with funding body requirements, including:

  • Gold Open Access, in which the author pays the publication fee (APC),
  • Sponsored Open Access, in which some of our institutional or society partners have paid for Open Access for an article, section or all of their journal,
  • Green Open Access, which allows authors to deposit their peer-reviewed, accepted version of their manuscript into an institutional repository with no embargo. We also allow authors to deposit the submitted version of their article in preprint servers, and
  • Read and Publish agreements are now being explored with subscribing institutions to enable corresponding authors to publish without APC charges

Collage of various journal covers with Open Access logoWhether published Open Access or through subscription access, all content goes through the same rigorous peer review process to keep our publications to the highest possible standard, and to ensure we uphold the values of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which we are a member.

Read more about our Open Access policies and publication charges on our website, and browse our journals for more information.

Find out about our publishing policies including COPE membership and publication ethics.