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Open Access

This page contains information about Article Processing Charges (APC), where to find funding for APCs, and how to find out more information about sharing work openly without paying APCs.

Article Processing Charges (APC)

Article Processing Charges and Publication Fees

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.A graphic with blue bars showing Article Processing Charges for 1090 Gold OA journals in DOAJ

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

APC Funding

Finding APC Support

Researchers often pursue funding for OA through:

There are also ways of making 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.). Many times researchers can share specific versions of their work for free in specific locations. This is called self-archiving or green open access.  Learn more about green open access here and 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.

Agreements

Read and Publish Agreements

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

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 participating 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.

Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)

APCs are covered for all hybrid RSC journals. Authors also receive a 15% discount on APCs for gold OA RSC journals. For more information, please visit here

Springer Nature

Corresponding authors affiliated with UD (or another participating institution within Lyrasis) will have APCs waived when they publish in any of Springer Nature’s hybrid journals. For more information, please visit here.

Discounts

Publishing Fee Discounts

UD authors may get a discount on publishing open access with the following publishers:

Learn More