Skip to Main Content

Library Subject Guides

5. Publish & Share: Prepaid Open Access Agreements

Other Research Support Guides 1. Plan (Design and Discover) your Research >> 2. Find & Manage Research Literature >> 3. Doing the Research >> 4. Writing up your Research >> 6. Measure Impact

 

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  

 

APC-Free Journals

When you submit your paper as a corresponding author to any of these journals, remember to indicate that UC has a read and publish agreement with them.

Is the journal you're looking for not eligible? If it's a fully open access journal (all articles are open acces by default) please apply to the Library Open Access Fund for APC funding instead.

Some publishers have a cap on the number of APC-free publications we can provide, which is managed by the CAUL collective for Australian & New Zealand Universities. Use Reports to see how many manuscripts have been approved across the collective so far.

AIP
Selected journals

ACM Digital Library
All ACM Digital Library journals

American Psychological Association
Selected journals

BRILL
Selected journals

Cambridge University Press
Selected journals

CSIRO Publishing
Selected journals

Elsevier
Selected journals

Institute of Physics
Selected journals

Oxford University Press
365 Oxford University Press titles

PLOS
PLOS Biology
PLOS Medicine

Portland Press
Biochemical Journal
Bioscience Reports (fully OA)
Clinical Science
Neuronal Signaling (fully OA)
Biochemical Society Transactions
Emerging Topics in Life Sciences
Essays in Biochemistry

Royal Society
Philosophical Transactions A
Philosophical Transactions B
Proceedings A
Proceedings B
Biology Letters
Interface
Interface Focus
Notes and Records
Open Biology
Royal Society Open Science

SAGE
Selected journals
20% discount on Gold OA

SCOAP3
Fully funded APCs in key high-energy physics (Elsevier, Springer, IOP, APS, Oxford) journals.  See full title list here, and ignore the % coverage column as author APCs are fully funded. 

Springer Nature 
Selected journals

Taylor & Francis 
Apply via the Library Open Access Fund if your journal appears in this list

Wiley 
Selected journals

Help/More Information

Profile Photo
Kim Hall
She/her
Email me with questions about Business, Economics, European Union, French, German, Russian, Spanish or Translation
Contact:
Level 5
Puaka James Hight
(03) 3693 918

Other APC Deals

ASME

50% APC discount on all journals

Elsevier

15% APC discount on hybrid/gold articles not covered by our agreement.

ICE Journals

15% APC discount.  Corresponding author should use a Canterbury email address when publishing.

MDPI

10% APC discount for any paper published in an MDPI journal. More details here. A list of MDPI journals is available here.

Please see UC Library's MDPI statement.

Royal Society of Chemistry

15% APC discount automatically applied upon acceptance of an article where the corresponding author uses their institution’s email domain.