Read & Publish Agreements FAQ

(Last updated: 11 February 2025)

How are authors identified as eligible?

When a journal article enters our production workflow, we match all author affiliations against the ROR.org database. For the author marked as the corresponding author, we then check if there is a match with the RORs associated with our Read and Publish agreements, and if and agreement is found, we further check if the submit/accept date of the article falls within the scope of that agreement. If the article is submitted with more than one author and no author clearly identified as the corresponding author, and/or if there are no submit/accept dates included, our production staff will contact the journal editors and the article authors to complete this information for the purpose of this process.

Is the email domain used?

We do not use the email domain, except as secondary information to help us match the affiliation to the correct ROR id, in case of any ambiguities. For instance, if institutions with similar names exist in more than one country, we use the email and -- if supplied -- postal address of the corresponding author to determine which is the correct institution that the affiliation refers to.

Do we only look at the first affiliation?

No, we look at all the affiliations of the corresponding author, and assign the Open Access to the first-listed affiliation that has a qualifying Read & Publish agreement.

What is the author workflow?

On our website we have a list of all our Read & Publish agreements, and their conditions. We refer authors to this list from various places in our website (general author information, specific journal information) and — for those journals that use it — from the journal's online submission portal. This allows authors to determine themselves whether or not an article submitted to one of our journals would qualify for Open Access under an agreement.
When an article enters our production workflow, after the journal editors have completed their assessment and have accepted the article for publication, we automatically check if the article qualifies under one of the agreements. We will then mark the article for Open Access publication under the license agreed with the institution.
We include information about that in the footer of the article and in the funding section, which the author then sees when they get proofs to check. If an author would have questions about the Open Access or the license, they could indicate this when they return the proofs to us, after which we would contact them to discuss their preferences.