Open Access Policy
Removing barriers to zoological knowledge, ensuring research reaches everyone who needs it.
Our Open Access Commitment
The Journal of Zoological Research publishes all accepted manuscripts under immediate open access, making research freely available from publication day without subscription barriers. We believe advances in animal science, conservation biology, and biodiversity research must reach practitioners, educators, and policymakers worldwide regardless of institutional resources.
Open access accelerates scientific progress by enabling immediate reading, sharing, and building upon published work. Conservation practitioners can access findings relevant to species protection efforts, educators can incorporate current research into classroom instruction, and researchers at institutions with limited library budgets can participate fully in scientific discourse.
Benefits of Open Access
Maximum Visibility
Open-access articles receive more downloads, citations, and media attention than subscription-restricted alternatives, amplifying research impact across academic and public audiences.
Global Reach
Researchers, wildlife managers, and conservationists worldwide can access your findings without institutional subscriptions, particularly benefiting colleagues in developing regions.
Funder Compliance
Our open-access model satisfies mandates from major funding agencies requiring publicly accessible publication of supported research, facilitating grant compliance.
Creative Commons Licensing
All articles publish under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licensing, permitting unrestricted reuse with proper attribution to original authors. This licensing enables text mining, derivative works, and educational applications while ensuring appropriate credit for intellectual contributions.
Sustainable Open Access
Article processing charges support our open-access operations, replacing subscription revenue with author-side funding. Comprehensive fee waiver programs ensure financial constraints never prevent valuable research from reaching publication. We're committed to sustainable approaches that maintain open access permanently while supporting editorial quality and author services.
Archival Preservation
Published articles are preserved through digital archival networks including LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, ensuring permanent accessibility regardless of future changes to our platform or organization. Your research remains freely available indefinitely, protected through redundant archival systems maintaining the permanent scholarly record.
Supporting Conservation Applications
Open access directly supports conservation outcomes by enabling practitioners to access relevant research for species and habitat protection decisions. Wildlife managers, protected area staff, and NGO conservation teams frequently lack institutional journal access, making open publication essential for translating zoological research into practical conservation action.
Author Rights and Permissions
Authors retain full copyright to their published work while granting the journal non-exclusive rights for distribution. This author-friendly approach recognizes that researchers should maintain control over their intellectual contributions. You may freely share, adapt, and build upon your published work for presentations, book chapters, institutional repositories, or follow-up research without requiring publisher permission, though proper citation of the original publication is expected.
The CC-BY license enables educational institutions to incorporate published research into course materials, supporting training of future zoologists with current findings. Conservation organizations can translate research summaries for stakeholder communications, extending impact beyond academic audiences to communities directly affected by wildlife management decisions.
Version Control and Self-Archiving
Authors may deposit final published versions in institutional repositories immediately upon publication without embargo periods. Preprint servers may also host earlier manuscript versions, enabling rapid dissemination of preliminary findings while formal peer review proceeds. We encourage authors to update preprint records with DOI links once articles are formally published, connecting early-access readers with the peer-reviewed final version.
Self-archiving practices expand article reach through institutional discovery systems while maintaining the journal version as the authoritative citation target. These practices align with open-science principles emphasizing accessibility and transparency throughout the research communication lifecycle.
Supporting FAIR Principles
Our open-access policies support FAIR data principles ensuring research outputs are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Published articles receive structured metadata enabling discovery through academic search engines and biodiversity informatics platforms. Machine-readable article formats support text-mining applications extracting insights across large publication corpuses, advancing computational approaches to zoological synthesis and meta-analysis.
Questions About Open Access?
Contact our editorial office for guidance on licensing terms, self-archiving policies, or compliance documentation for institutional or funder reporting requirements. We're committed to helping authors maximize the reach and impact of their zoological research through informed open-access publishing.
Global Impact
Our open-access publications reach researchers, practitioners, and educators across every continent, contributing to global efforts protecting biodiversity and advancing zoological understanding. Your research becomes part of the permanent scholarly record accessible to current and future generations of scientists who will build upon your discoveries to further advance our understanding of animal biology and conservation needs facing species and their habitats and natural ecosystems worldwide.
