Publish and Read FAQs

I see that papers are managed through CCC RightsLink for Scientific Communications, and the agreement has appeared in our account dashboard. Do we need to manually approve papers in the dashboard?

We strongly recommend turning on automatic approvals as our uncapped Publish and Read is not set up to handle denials. Automatic approval means that as soon as an article is accepted, and assuming the corresponding author has self-identified as a member of your institution during submission, we will proceed with open access publication under the terms of our agreement. If auto-approvals are not activated, then each funding request will need to be approved individually. Turn automatic approvals on in RightsLink by:

• Clicking the 'Billing Profiles' tab and then ticking the box in the automatic approvals column next to your billing profile for Microbiology Society.
• Separately, you may also wish to turn off email notifications. To do this, click the 'Billing Profiles' tab, then click your billing profile for Microbiology Society. Click the pencil icon above the ‘Contacts’ section. Tick the box for ‘Suppress email notifications,’ then click 'Next', 'Next', and 'Save'.

What will happen if I do not activate auto-approval in RightsLink?

If you do not activate auto-approval, each article must be individually approved on your dashboard upon receipt of the email notification. This may introduce unnecessary delays in the manuscript workflow.

Will I still be notified of articles on our dashboard if I activate auto-approve?

If you turn on auto-approval, you will continue to receive email notifications when an article has been accepted for publication from your institution unless you switch this off, however, whether or not your receive notification, no action will be required. The articles will still appear in your dashboard, but the buttons for approval and denial will be greyed out.

At what point do papers come to us on the OA Switchboard and on RightsLink’s dashboard? At submission, acceptance or publication?  

Verson of Record OA articles associated with a Publish and Read agreement will be reported via the OA Switchboard when they are published; and all OA manuscripts will be visible on your RightsLink dashboard when accepted for publication and the reports will indicate whether a fee has been paid, or whether the manuscript falls under a Publish and Read deal.

Which article types are eligible for Publish and Read deals, e.g. are things like Letters and Reviews eligible? Does the publisher filter out the article types that aren’t eligible, so these won't appear in either the OA Switchboard or the RightsLink dashboard? 

We have no filter to screen for particular article types – our deal includes everything at the moment. This is for administrative simplicity, although as our systems refine around customer needs for Publish and Read reporting, we will keep this under review. We welcome feedback on this.