Quantitative Plant Biology (QPB) is a community-based journal, co-published by Cambridge University Press and The John Innes Centre, with a prestigious and engaged editorial board led by Dr Olivier Hamant.

QPB was established with the belief that plant science research is a key endeavour in a changing environment. For this, not only does the journal build on cutting-edge quantitative approaches, it also opens the field to citizen science and art & science with dedicated article formats and collections. At QPB, we believe that research is first and foremost a question of creativity. This also means that plant science should be available to everyone, everywhere, and that the processes behind the research should be fully transparent.

This ethics moves beyond just being an open access journal, to fully embracing other open research practices including:

1. Open access: QPB is a wholly open access journal, which means all articles are published as gold open access under a Creative Commons licence and are available to all to read. We also want to support all authors to publish in the journal and outline below the ways in which QPB remains a publication outlet for any authors without funding. QPB is also a Peer Community Initiative-friendly journal.
2. Open peer review: QPB has an open peer review model for full transparency about decision-making, and to enable reviewers to collect their contributions as part of their academic record. Accepted manuscripts are published with their review reports, which can be published alongside the reviewer names or anonymously.
3. Open data: QPB believes that research articles should contain sufficient information to allow others to understand, verify, and replicate findings, and that wherever possible authors should make evidence and resources that underpin published findings, such as data, code, and other materials, available to readers without undue barriers to access. QPB asks that authors include a data availability statement describing how readers may access the resources that support the author’s findings. 

Ensuring author equity is essential to both The John Innes Centre and Cambridge University Press. Although there is an article processing charge for authors with funding, the majority of our authors are covered by our transformative agreements (check the tracker here to see if your institution is included). For those not covered, we have a generous waiver programme:

• Developing country waiver policy: we grant full or partial discounts to any corresponding authors based in qualifying countries (100% waivers for papers whose corresponding authors are based in Research4Life ’Group A’ countries, and 50% waivers for those based in ‘Group B’ countries).

• Cambridge Open Equity Initiative: this initiative covers over 5,000 institutions around the world, with over 100 countries eligible for fully funded open access publishing in all our gold and hybrid journals, at no direct cost to authors or their institutions. See more details on the initiative here

• John Innes Centre discount: members of the John Innes Centre are entitled to 20% discount on the article processing charge when they are corresponding author on a paper.

• Discretionary waivers: any authors without funding and who are not eligible via the transformative agreement or waiver programmes listed above will qualify for a discretionary waiver. All those authors need to do is apply and provide a signed letter from their institution confirming that no funding is available, and we waive the fee.

Please see here for more details on any of the above.