Publishing fees in open access journals
When an open access journal is not included in an agreement
Many open access journals are financed by publication fees, so-called Article Processing Charges (APC). As a researcher at Lund University, you can apply for funding of the APC in pure open access journals that are not included in any of the agreements.
Researchers at Lund University can apply for funding of the APC in pure open access journals when the journal is not covered by any of the publisher agreements.
This financial publishing support does not include extra costs for pages and color images.
Costs of publishing open access at Lund University
When publishing open access, the entire amount for the APC or BPC is initially paid by the University Library. Parts of the cost of publishing (within the agreements, those paid with the extra publishing support or the Book fund) are later invoiced to the faculties. Depending on how your faculty choose to handle the costs, you may have to pay a part of the publication fee later on.
The allocation model for Lund University's publishing costs was decided by the vice-chancellor in 2022.
Lund University has several agreements with publishers, where open access journals are often included. If an open access journal is included in an agreement, no application for funding is required.
Search for journals included in current publisher agreements
Open access fees for books and book chapters can be financed through the Lund University book fund.
Apply for funding for publishing books open access
Terms and conditions for a granted application
The following criteria must be met in order for us to grant your application:
Terms for the author
- The applicant must be the corresponding author of the article.
- The applicant's affiliation to Lund University must be stated in the article.
- The applicant must be an employee at LU and have a LUCAT, and must be funded by LU. Researchers who are funded by Region Skåne are not eligible.
- The financial support does not cover costs for pages and/or color images.
Terms for the journal
- The journal must be pure open access. No support is granted for publishing in hybrid journals or journals with delayed open access.
- The journal must meet some quality requirements and follow good publishing practices for scientific journals. At least one of the following requirements must be met:
- The journal is registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
- The publisher is a member of the OASPA.
- The journal is indexed in a quality-controlled database such as Scopus or Web of Science. - The journal must not have level 0 in the Norwegian Register during the year of publication or the following year.
Read more about choosing an open access journal and assessing publishers and journals
How to apply
- Apply by filling out the application form, which is sent to the University Library. Apply in connection with the submission of a manuscript.
Application form for OA publishing - You will get a reply as to whether your application has been approved or not. Upon approval, we also send additional instructions for handling the invoice.
No financial support for publishing in hybrid journals
The main reasons why APCs for hybrid journals are not funded by the central fund at LU are as follows:
- The average hybrid journal APC is in fact almost twice as expensive as the average full OA journal APC.
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Few publishers have a clear correlation between the subscription price and the number of APC-funded papers in a journal (the double-dipping problem). I.e. the subscription price should go down when the number of articles paid by an APC increases. This is beginning to improve, but it´s still the main reason most Universities don’t support publishing in hybrid journals if it´s not included in an agreement. In short, we try to make as much as possible to support a transition towards open access with the limited amount of resources there is.
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Publishing in hybrid journals is becoming well covered by several national publisher agreements that Lund University takes part in.
Contact
For questions about the publishing process, bibliometrics, research data, open access, please contact your faculty library or
publicera [at] lub [dot] lu [dot] se
For questions about LUCRIS, please contact:
servicedesk [at] lu [dot] se
Apply here!
Application form for financial support for publishing in open access journals
Search for journals in DOAJ
Directory of open access journals
Member list OASPA
Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association
Publishing in a subscription-based journal when the research funder requires OA
One alternative is to self-archive the article in LUCRIS if the publishing house allows this. The majority of research funders allow self-archiving as an alternative to direct OA publishing.