Publishing academic research and scholarship is a costly enterprise—on multiple fronts—and many costs have now shifted to the submitting author.
Efforts to increase accessibility to academic publications are broadly called “open access.” The obvious way this relationship works is by removing the paywall required to read articles. There are some other benefits to open access. For example, open access articles increase visibility of researchers’ work and authors maintain their copyright and do not have to request permission to reuse their work.
Open access can help the author, too. Article processing charges, or APCs, can be prohibitive for authors to publish, particularly in premier journals. APCs can range from around $1000 to over $10,000 per article. For journals that have an article processing charge, the average APC runs between $1,500 and $2,500.
There are some alternatives here at CSU that can help. CSU Libraries negotiated agreements with the publishers Wiley and Cambridge to waive the APCs for some journals.
The new agreement with Wiley covers APCs for primary research and review articles published by corresponding authors affiliated with CSU. To qualify, articles must be published open access in a hybrid journal—subscription journals that give authors an opportunity to publish their article as open access in exchange for payment of an APC—and must have been accepted on or after January 1, 2022.
The agreement with Cambridge University Press, the “Read & Publish” agreement, allows any CSU corresponding author to publish in any Cambridge open access/hybrid journal without paying any article processing charges. CSU Libraries will pay the APC on the author’s behalf as part of CSU Libraries’ transformative agreement with Cambridge.
What—or who—is a “corresponding author,” you ask? According to Cambridge, “the Corresponding Author is the person who handles the manuscript and correspondence during the publication process, including approving the article proof.”
While the jargon of higher education might pose another barrier to engaging and creating scholarly work, CSU Libraries are working to ensure cost doesn’t keep you from sharing your research or scholarly work.
CSU Writes offers a variety of programming to help you progress on your academic writing for publication, and we encourage you to view our event schedule on our website.
Questions about the open access? Get in touch with Copyright and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Khaleedah Thomas, at Khaleedah.Thomas@colostate.edu.