If you are interested in making your work open access you have a variety of options. You can choose to publish with an open access journal, pay to make traditional journal articles open (see below for programs to help with these fees for certain publishers), or self-archive your work on a subject or an institutional repository. Note that all publishers have different policies on this, and that you have room to negotiate for your own requirements.

If you’re interested in open access but unsure of where to start, talk your subject specialist librarian. They can help guide you to good journals, and discuss scholarly communication trends in your discipline.

Article Processing Charge (APC) Waivers

Loyola currently has agreements with two publishers that allow Loyola faculty and students to publish open access in their journals without paying the article processing charge. The publishers and requirements are listed below.

• Wiley: Article publication charges (APCs) for primary research and review articles published by corresponding authors currently affiliated with Loyola University Chicago will be covered as part of Loyola University Chicago’s agreement with Wiley*. To qualify, articles must be published open access in a hybrid journal and must have been accepted on or after 1 Jan 2022.
  *subject to availability of sufficient funds.
• Cambridge University Press:
  • Have a corresponding author affiliated with Loyola University.
  • Be original research – eligible article types are research articles, review articles, rapid communications, brief reports and case reports.
  • Be accepted for publication in a Cambridge University Press journal covered by the agreement.
  • Be accepted for publication from 1 January 2022.

More about Article Processing Fees

If you’re not used to the idea, being asked to pay any fee can seem like a scam or like you’re bribing a publisher to publish you. That’s just not the case for the majority of open access journals. Even many subscription journals charge page fees to authors, so it’s not unique to open access.

Traditionally, journals were funded by subscriptions paid by libraries, individuals, as well as institutional or grant funding. While that is still the prevalent model, the price of journals—particularly online access through databases—has far outstripped inflation, and leaves many libraries struggling to pay for access. Open access journals are often still funded by institutions or grants, and do not charge publication fees. This is more common in certain disciplines, but you can find open access journals across the board that don’t require a fee.

In others, the journal does charge a fee that goes to the cost of editing, layout, web hosting, and the other costs built into running a journal. This has the added benefit of making the article available to anyone, even those without access to libraries who can subscribe to journals. This is called “gold” open access.

Note that this term is also used for commercial publishers who charge fees for making articles available open access in a subscription journal. Since 2012, this practice has become extremely common as more and more funding bodies, particularly federal grants, require that work be made open access within a designated time period. Commercial publishers often have an embargo on making work open access that exceeds the grant requirements, and so the only way the author can comply with the funder is to pay the open access fee. These certainly can be written into research grants, but you will need to be thinking about this far in advance of publication in that case.

Some open access journals offer a fee waiver program if you wouldn’t be able to pay the fee (example PLOS). Loyola has several agreements with publishers to waive the fee. You can see a real-life example of how someone manages to make work open access at the NeuroDojo blog. If you work in biological or medical sciences, PeerJ provides an innovative model with a lifetime publication fee starting at $99.

Be wary of publication fees when you haven’t been told up front what the fee is.

This term was popularized by librarian Jeffrey Beall to describe publishers that provide little or no peer review or editorial oversight, and charge high publication fees (particularly if these are not stated up front). A controversial but influential 2013 investigation by John Bohannon for Science found that a number of journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals accepted a low quality scientific paper for payment of a fee. Note that this investigation only looked at open access journals, so there is no way to compare to other low quality subscription journals. Nevertheless, by the time this report came out, the Directory of Open Access had already begun an initiative to improve the quality of their listings by requiring all publishers to reapply for inclusion of their journals with stricter standards. This initiative is now complete, and means that you will be able to trust it as a source for determining information about a journal.

For Further Reading

Bohannon, John. “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?” Science 342, no. 6154 (October 4, 2013): 60–65. doi:10.1126/science.342.6154.60. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.

Heller, Margaret. "A Clean House at the Directory of Open Access Journals." ACRL TechConnect Blog. (November 30, 2015). http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/post/a-clean-house-at-the-directory-of-open-access-journals.

1. If you receive an email solicitation from a journal asking for a submission, read the text carefully, and note the publisher’s name. Predatory publishers often have names that sound like legitimate publishers to fool you into thinking they are the same.
2. Look at the journal’s website. Does it look professional? Does it have contact information for staff? Where is it located? Note that not all legitimate open access journals have nice looking websites or have fancy offices, and some predatory journals do. But if the text doesn’t seem make sense, or you Google the address and find it’s a suburban house, those are huge red flags.
3. Examine the names of people on the board or editors. If you can’t find this information, that might be a warning sign. If you know someone on the list, ask them about their experience working with the journal. Some predatory journals have been known to list people on their website who aren’t actually on the board to fool potential contributors.
4. Look up the journal in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. Not all journals will be listed in here, but you should be able to find most legitimate open access journals. Make sure the journal is indexed, and ideally by a database with which you’re familiar. Check to see if the publisher information matches up with what you’ve found elsewhere.
5. Look up the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Journals listed there are expected to conform to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.
6. Look up the journal in Cabell's Predatory Reports.
7. If a journal is very new, it may not be listed in directories, indexed, or have much on its website. You may still want to publish with that journal if you know something about it and believe in its mission. Not all open access journals (or subscription journals, for that matter) make it, so if you are taking a chance on a lesser known but still legitimate journal, ensure that you archive your work elsewhere so it is not lost if the journal goes out of business. Loyola’s eCommons is the ideal place to do that. Some journals participate in journal preservation services such as JSTOR, LOCKSS, or Portico, but even so it is in your own interests to maintain a stable link to your work.