Major grant for Microbiology Society publishing

09 July 2020

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This week, the Microbiology Society was awarded a grant by the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) as part of their Learned Society Curation Awards. These awards were designed to support society publishers who “want to explore new ways of signalling the significance of published research outputs in an open and transparent manner”.

The Society has made real commitments to Open Access (OA), from launching pure OA journals like Microbial Genomicsto our innovative Publish and Read model which allows authors to publish OA in all of the Society’s journals free of charge. 

Our application for the grant was to set up something called an open research platform; offering a new publishing model to the microbiology community that will deliver peer-review transparency and a fast-track for communicating research. This should maximise the potential for impact and influence. When we first started exploring the possibilities of an open research platform, members of Microbiology Society’s Publishing Committee and Council agreed that there is a lot of overlap between what an open research platform could offer and the scope of Access Microbiology.

Access Microbiology is the Society’s newest journal, with its scope covering the entirety of microbiology and virology, and is designed to encourage publication of replication studies, negative results, additions to established methods and so on. Receiving a grant under the Learned Society Curation Awards means we will be able to make a significant investment in creating an innovative new model for this journal. 

Throughout the grant application process, the Microbiology Society has kept members at the centre of our plans. As we start work on the project with support from Wellcome and HHMI we want to hear from you. If you are willing to be involved in any aspect of the project, please get in touch with Tasha Mellins-Cohen ([email protected]) to express your interest.