Open Access

An article processing charge (APC)  is a fee that publishers charge authors in order to publish an article open access. This fee is sometimes called an Author Processing Charge or an Article Processing Fee.

The Library is aware of the challenge that researchers face when publishers require APCs to publish openly, but we cannot support paying these fees for a few different reasons:

• The Library does not currently have funding to cover article processing charges
• The Library is already paying for access to these journals, so if the Library paid APCs as well, we’d be paying the journal twice -- once for access, and once for each publication. Learn more about this publisher behavior known as double dipping
• Paying for APCs, in most cases does not get us closer to open access structurally

Learn more:

Pinfield, S., Salter, J. and Bath, P.A. (2016) The 'total cost of publication' in a hybrid open-access environment: Institutional approaches to funding journal article-processing charges in combination with subscriptions. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67 (7). pp. 1751-1766. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23446

Thomas Shafee, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Finding APC Support

People often pursue funding for OA through:

• Research grants
• Their academic departments
• The UD Research Office

There are also ways of making your research publicly accessible that do not require paying any fees at all, including using scholarly communication tools like Sherpa Romeo to determine journal sharing policies. Sherpa Romeo compiles and summarizes journal policies making it easier for authors to understand what versions of their work that they can freely share (i.e., original submission, peer-reviewed version, publisher's version) and in what locations they can share that work (ArXiv, UDSpace, disciplinary repositories, etc.). Learn more about using Sherpa Romeo here.

Learn more:

Book a consultation with our Digital Publishing and Copyright Librarian, Paige Morgan, to learn more about making your research and publications discoverable to wider audiences without paying APCs.

A Read and Publish agreement, also known as a transformative agreement, is an agreement between an institution and a publisher. Under the agreement, the institution pays an amount to the publisher for access to its journals. In return, the publisher allows researchers from the institution to publish articles in those journals without any costs to the researchers, like article processing charges, or open access fees. 

Cambridge University Press

The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press has entered into a read and publish agreement with Cambridge University Press to support Open Access publishing. This means that if you are affiliated with the University of Delaware (or another participating institution), you can publish articles Open Access, at no cost to you, in any of Cambridge University Press's gold and hybrid journals, at least through 2024.

To be eligible, articles must:

• Have a corresponding author affiliated with UD (or another participating institution)
• Be an eligible article type: research articles, review articles, rapid communications, brief reports and case reports
• Be accepted for publication in a Cambridge University Press journal covered by the agreement

For more information, please visit here.