Open Access Scholarship

Article Processing Charges, or APCs are fees charged by academic publishers to authors who want to publish their work as Open Access. Instead of charging subscription fees to libraries and readers, APCs transfer the economic burden of publishing from the readers to the authors. The cost of APCs varies from journal to journal, but can range anywhere from $500 to $6,000. In a 2022 study of Gold OA journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), researchers found that the average APC (excluding journals that charge no APCs) was around $1,997. The same study also concluded that journals in scientific disciplines charged significantly more for APCs than journals in humanities disciplines. 

Most Open Access Journals do not have APCs for authors. Still, many of the journals that do charge APCs are published under legacy publishers, according to a 2024 quantitative research study, "Research on Open Access Journals Based on Article Processing Charges." See the graphics below detailing the average APCs broken down by publisher type from the same study.

The College of Staten Island Library currently has no funding initiatives for APCs. University Libraries that have tried funding initiatives for APCs, such as the University of Virginia Library and Johns Hopkins University, have found that these initiatives are unsustainable due to decreasing library budgets. Please contact your departmental office to see if they have funding to cover your APC.

CUNY affiliated authors can publish their work as Open Access for free by uploading their projects to CUNY Academic Works, our institutional repository, even if they are published in a traditional journal. Authors can look up OA embargo information on journals in which they have published using the Jisc Open Policy Finder (Formerly Sherpa Romeo).

In many cases, researchers who are utilizing grant money for their projects can use said grant money to cover their APC. Some publishers may have APC waivers available for authors who are in financial need and grant opportunities for APC coverage, please check the journal/publisher's website for this information. A list of OA publication funds can be found through the Open Access Directory. See the list below for additional funding opportunities:

• Springer Nature Funding and Support Services has provided over 350 grants for APCs. Funding for Book Processing Charges (BPCs) may also be available.
• Wellcome, an international charitable foundation that promotes open science, accepts grant proposals for APCs from researchers in the health sciences. 
• The PLOS Publication Fee Assistance Program assists authors with APC funding when submitting to a PLOS journal.

"Read and Publish Agreements", sometimes called transformative agreements, are contracts between publishers and universities that encourage open science. These agreements stipulate that universities cover the APCs for their researchers in exchange for the universities having free access to the publisher's non-OA catalog. By shifting funds from subscription-based reading to publishing costs, a transformative agreement aims to create a cost-neutral read-and-publish model, while also formalizing publishing fees through a contractual arrangement.

The City University of New York (CUNY) has an Open Access publishing agreement with The American Chemical Society (ACS). Authors associated with CUNY colleges, including CSI, can publish for free in the following ACS journals: ACS Central Science, ACS Omega, ACS Au journals, and ACS hybrid journal. Waivers may be available for other ACS journals. Please visit the ACS CUNY read-and-publish agreement page or contact CUNY's Scholarly Communications Manager, Johanna Karlin, at jojo.karlin@cuny.edu for more information on the agreement.