International Open Access Week 2024 is here! This year’s theme is “Community over Commercialization” —and from Oct. 21 to 27, the Libraries is highlighting some of the many ways you can leverage community resources and support to make your work open access (OA) for free.
Welcome to day three of International Open Access Week 2024. Today, we’re going to focus on the Libraries’ open access agreements, which remove financial barriers for University of Iowa authors on the path to freely and openly sharing the results of their research.
Gold OA (or publisher-facilitated OA) accomplishes the goal of making your work open and available to readers everywhere. But publishers pass along the costs of publication to authors in the form of Article Processing Charges (APCs). Depending on the journal, these fees can be quite expensive (for example, the APC to publish OA in Nature is $12,290), creating barriers to OA publishing for authors without grants or other funding.
To expand the OA publishing options for UI authors, the Libraries has entered into open access agreements with publishers. Under these agreements, the Libraries pay publishers a single fee to give UI authors the opportunity to publish open access in their journals without paying APCs. The Libraries has contracted 18 open access agreements so far, with major scholarly publishers like Wiley, American Chemical Society, and Cambridge University Press. The terms of the agreements can differ, but eligibility is determined at the point of submission or acceptance, to make the process as easy and seamless as possible for authors.
Since the Libraries entered our first OA agreement in 2019, UI authors have saved over $3.36 million in APCs to publish hundreds of OA articles.
We’re negotiating new agreements with publishers whenever possible, so check the list of OA agreements or contact us to find out if you can publish your article OA for free.