What should I do if I cannot afford a journal Article Processing Charge?

Question

I would like to publish an article open access, but I cannot afford the article processing charge (APC). I am based in the UK, so I do not qualify for some of the available fee reductions or waivers. I also do not have grant funding to coverage the fee. How can I obtain funding to cover the publication fee to make my research open access?

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Answer 1

I am not sure about where you are looking to submit your paper, but I submitted a paper to PLOS ONE, which I could not finance the APC of. I applied for a partial waiver, and received it within days (90%!). Double check the policy whether there is really no way to apply for a waiver if you are from a developed country, just to be sure.

Answer 2

If you are at a university, you might be eligible for open access publication funding. Ask your academic library about it. It is one of their tasks to help you publish, preferably in open access journals.

In Germany, the national funding body DFG encourages universities to apply for participation in its Open Access Publishing funding programme. My university does this and has a Web page explaining how to get article processing charges financed.

Comments

The Open Access Directory maintains a list of universities with funds to pay APCs for faculty members.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journal_funds

Answer 3

Your question seems to conflate open access with APC, which is a mistake.

1. There are Gold OA journal without APC (at least in some fields, including mine, mathematics).

2. There are many green OA journals, i.e. journals that let you post the "postprint" (author's layout of the post-peer review version) of the article. Many publishers, including big commercial ones, have this policy. The journal version is still beihind a paywall, but the science is still open (and I tend to prefer my layout to the journal one in many cases).

3. There are OA journal where you have to pay, but very little: PeerJ (also has a computer science version) asks for 100 to 300 bucks for a lifetime worth of publishing; journals run with Scholastica ask for 10$ per submission (sometimes paid by the institution funding the journal).