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Library Subject Guides

5. Publish & Share: Open Access Agreements

Open Access Info: Click here for information about Open Access at UC

Library Open Access Fund: Click to learn about the Library Open Access Fund, which is available to help researchers pay article processing charges

Read and Publish Agreements

What are read and publish agreements?

A Read-and-Publish agreement is an agreement in which the publisher receives payment for reading and payment for publishing bundled into a single contract. The ‘read’ part of the agreement covers the subscriptions libraries pay so they can access closed material, and the ‘publish’ part covers APCs that authors would have paid to publish their papers as open access. This bundling together brings payment for publishing into a contractual arrangement handled by the library rather than being addressed ad hoc by individual authors who are choosing open access publishing. These agreements are 'transformative' as they seek to re-direct funds previously spent on subscription-based reading to the publishing component, often with a goal of a cost-neutral agreement in comparison with the previous subscription-based reading agreement.

Source

Types of agreements

Community Publishing (e.g. PLOS) Transformative Agreements (e.g. Microbiology Society, CSIRO, Royal Society)
Non-profit open access publisher May be non-profit societies but will eventually include corporate publishing companies
"A community-supported model whereby members agree to share the costs of editorial and publishing services" via a community fee Still use APCs, but builds that into the cost of subscriptions
Non-members will pay fees, but idea is cost is capped at cost of production Cost of publishing versus APCs remains obscure                                                              
Publishing cost is distributed between corresponding and contributing authors  

 

Other APC Deals

MDPI

Authors affiliated with the University of Canterbury receive a 10% discount on the APCs for any paper published in an MDPI journal. More details here. A list of MDPI journals is available here.