This article explains different routes to reduce or avoid Open Access publishing costs.

Article Processing Charges

Publishing Open Access (OA) is the norm at WUR. According to the WUR Open Access policy, publishing Open Access for peer-reviewed articles is either required or recommended. Publishing your article Open Access may involve an associated fee.

Traditional scholarly publishing has operated on a subscription model, where readers or their institutions pay to read a publication. Open Access changes this: publications are made freely accessible online to all readers.

To cover the loss of revenue, some, but not all, publishers charge Article Processing Charges (APCs). The fees can range from a few hundred to several thousand Euros, depending on the journal and publisher. Some major publishers even charge around € 10.000 for an article.

Who pays for the APCs?

You, as the author, are responsible for paying the APCs. WUR Library doesn’t have an institutional fund for Open Access publishing. However, you have several options to publish Open Access for free. WUR Library has deals for many journals (> 11.000) of large publishers, so that WUR authors don’t need to pay if they want to publish Open Access. Funders such as NWO or Horizon Europe may cover APCs if you include these in your grant proposal. And then there are Open Access journals or platforms that don’t charge APCs at all. In the following paragraph, you can find more information about your options.

Which types of OA publishing routes exist?

• Gold Open Access: the journal is fully OA. As an author, you have to pay APCs for publication; the journal does not charge subscription fees for reading access.
• Hybrid Open Access: the journal is partly OA and partly subscription. As an author, you can choose to publish your article OA upon payment of the APC or publish behind a paywall. The journal charges subscription fees for reading access to articles published behind a paywall. 
• Green Open Access: if your article is published behind a paywall (e.g. in a hybrid OA journal), you can choose to self-archive a version of your article in a trusted OA repository such as Research@WUR. There are several ways to publish your article in green OA, please check below.
• Diamond Open Access: the journal is fully OA and does not charge any APCs. One or more organisations or consortia fund the costs of publishing and hosting.
• Preprints: A preprint is an academic manuscript that is made openly available on a preprint server, typically before peer-review. This enables new scientific knowledge to be shared in a timely and open way.

Options to reduce or avoid APCs

There are several ways to reduce or avoid APCs. Please consider your funder's requirements, e.g. regarding licence or embargo period, before selecting a journal. Furthermore, it is advised to discuss the journal(s) of your choice within your research group before submitting, as not only costs but also values such as quality, sovereignty, etc., play an important role when deciding where to publish. 

1. Publish in a journal with a WUR Library OA deal or publish in a Diamond OA journal. Check the WUR Journal Browser to find out for which journals you don’t need to pay APCs and what the deal requirements are if you can use a deal. Also see this knowledge article for instructions about the Journal Browser.

2. If no OA deal exists for the journal of your choice, you have several options:
   1. Consider selecting a similar suitable high-quality journal that does have an OA deal. You can use the ‘similar journals’ option in the WUR Journal Browser.
   2. If your funder covers APCs, you may claim APCs with your funder. Check the funder requirements to find out. Often, to use this option, you must have included APCs in the grant proposal, and you need to publish in a full gold OA journal.
   3. If your research is funded by a Plan S funder, such as NWO and EU, you may be allowed to publish behind a paywall in a hybrid OA journal and open the postprint via the Rights Retention Strategy. Please note that some publishers charge so-called Article Development Costs for peer-review, instead, or they will redirect your manuscript to a full gold OA journal, for which you still have to pay APCs. In those cases, the Rights Retention Strategy is not or only to a limited extent, advantageous.
   4. If you publish with an external organisation that aims to have the corresponding authorship, you may ‘split up’ the submitting author and the corresponding author, as the submitting author normally is the one who receives the deal. Check the WUR Journal Browser for the deal requirements of the journal of your choice. 
   5. If you don’t need to publish your article with immediate Open Access, you can publish behind a paywall and open the PDF of your article via the Taverne route after an embargo period of 6 months embargo. This is automatically done (with opt-out option) if you have a WU contract. If you have a WR-contract, you actively need to fill in the Taverne form. For being able to use the Taverne route as a WR-author, your article has to be partly or wholly funded by Dutch public funds. If this is not the case, you can self-archive the postprint of your article (check option f below).    
   6. Publish behind a paywall and self-archive the Author Accepted Manuscript / postprint after the embargo period of the publisher. Publishers’ embargos may be as long as 24 months. If you select this option, please send your postprint to pure.library@wur.nl. WUR Library will take care of the publisher’s embargo period for you.  

3. Don’t publish in a journal, but via an immediately accessible preprint with a CC BY license. If your preprint is peer-reviewed - e.g. via the Publish-Review-Curate model with examples as PeerCommunity In, eLife, MetaROR, etc. -  you are compliant with the WUR Academic Career Framework. 

Questions & support

If you would like to receive personal support from WUR Library’s Open Access specialists, please email us. We are happy to help you.