All research articles published in Genome Biology are open access, which means the articles are universally and freely available online. In addition, the authors retain copyright of their article, and grant any third party the right to use reproduce and disseminate the article, subject to the terms of our copyright and license agreement. Allowing the authors to retain copyright of their work permits wider distribution of their work on the condition it is correctly attributed to the authors.

For non-research articles authors retain the copyright of their article, but they grant BioMed Central, Genome Biology's publisher, an exclusive license to publish this article for two years, after which the license becomes non-exclusive. During this period BioMed Central has the exclusive right to publish, translate, make summaries and other derivatives, and license others. For further details, please refer to our copyright licensing agreement for non-research articles.