So you want your paper to be open access?
Yes, but I don’t have money.
I know. Either legacy publishers are charging prohibitive Article Processing Charges (APC; and it’s unlikely they give your university a discount), or pure open access publishers are… well, they do the same thing. Publishing open access costs money; up to $6000 per paper, according to Ross Mounce’s survey.
So, unless I have money, I can’t make my papers open access?
Not quite. There are a list of ways to make your papers open at low cost. Let me walk you through them. The first one is quite simple. Ask the journal for a waiver.
Really, that’s your best advice?
But it works. Sometimes. There are two broad categories of waivers: those that are based on income, and those that are based on asking nicely. The first are available to researchers on the basis of their countries of affiliation, or their academic status. If you don’t qualify for either, you can always apply for a waiver. Legacy publishers are likely to reject you, but pure open access publishers can waive the fees either entirely, or by a lot.
OK, I asked, and they won’t waive my fees. What now?
Try to find a senior co-authors to cover the APC for you. Or split the bill. This is often a good solution.
My coauthors won’t pay. They can’t. Should I give up?
Of course not. It is time to explore other solutions. A lot of journals offer discounted APC to members of learned societies. For example, Ecology & Evolution charges a baseline APC of $1950, but waives 10% of it for members of a few societies (ESEB, BES, SSE). The membership at BES is $66, or $33 for students. It’s not a large saving, but it’s better than paying full price.
Another option is to call your university library. Maybe there is a special open access fund that you can use. Maybe they have deals with publishers. Maybe they will be aware of other possibilities to decrease the costs. Librarians are usually really knowledgeable.
The journal I want to publish in has no society discount, and I don’t have any university fund for open access. This is looking bad, isn’t it?
Not at all! What it means, is that the typeset, copy-edited text of your paper, won’t be open access. But this is just the packaging that the publisher put on top of your hard labor — then charge you, your university, and readers for.
The first thing to do is to secure your rights to your own paper. This sounds absurd, but most Copyright Transfer Forms are giving the publisher way too much ownership (any ownership at all is too much) on your work. The easiest way to prevent this is to use the SPARC Addendum. You can download a copy (here is the PDF), attach it to the publisher issued agreement, and be done with it. This document removes the exclusive publishing right that some publishers claim.
The second thing is to archive your paper in a repository. I use bioRxiv, or PeerJ Preprints, or figshare. This will create an open, freely available, copy of your paper. I particularly like bioRxiv because it creates a link to the published version of the paper. Readers can have access to the full text, and use the “correct” citation information, to the journal version.
Will it work with all journals?
If you use the SPARC Addendum, yes. Many journals have also stopped considering preprints as prior publication, so there is no reason not to put your paper online before it is submitted. The other important advantage, is that the last method allows you to publish anywhere. The results of a study on the perception of open access from ten years ago are still valid today. If you want to check all the marks (publish in journals with a good reputation, but still have your research openly available, and not pay too much for it if possible), then you can.
