International Open Access Week is October 20-26 this year, and an evergreen topic is how to cover the costs of open access (OA) scholarly publishing. A well-known model for funding OA publishing is to ask authors to foot the bill via article processing charges (APCs), and though some well-funded authors may be able to pay these fees with grant funds, others do not have this option.

So, is publishing your article open access out of reach if you don’t have grants funds to pay article processing charges? Not necessarily! There are many OA publishing options that do not involve APCs. And even if a journal does charge an APC, there may be ways to decrease the cost.

To learn more about your options, Columbia affiliates can review the slides from our Tuesday, October 21 online workshop “How to publish Open Access without Article Processing Charges (APCs).” Download here.

You can also review the resources below to learn more about no-fee and low-fee OA publishing options.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The DOAJ indexes over 22,000 OA journals, including almost 14,000 no-fee journals. You can search by keyword and view vital information about journals, including whether or not authors retain copyright, the licenses under which the journals publish, and the expected time between submission and publication.

Open Access Publishing Agreements from the Columbia Libraries

This page lists the details of agreements the Columbia Libraries has with publishers. Most of these agreements allow Columbia-affiliated authors to publish their journal articles OA at no cost. Read the details for each agreement, and note that the agreements usually require that the corresponding author is a Columbia affiliate.

APC waivers

Many OA journals say they will waive the APC for an OA article if the authors are based in a lower-income country, and some will waive the fee for early-career authors. Each publisher or journal has its own waiver criteria, so verify the details with journal editors. You may find a link to a journal’s waiver policy in the DOAJ record for the journal, or you can search on the journal’s website.

Subscription-based journals combined with open repositories

Sometimes publishing an article OA does not make sense. However, even if your published article is behind a subscription paywall, you can often make a version of that article freely accessible in an open repository or on your personal website. Check the JISC Open Policy Finder to determine the standard policies of a journal in which you are publishing. If you sign a publication agreement for a subscription-access publication, try to retain the right to distribute a version of your paper in a repository such as Columbia’s Academic Commons. Sometimes this is built into your author agreement, and you can propose an author addendum if it isn’t.