Research Guides: Knight Campus: Open Access and publishing

Publish OA for free

Free-to-Publish and Discounts through the UO Libraries

UO Libraries has deals with some publishers to entirely waive some APCs, and get discounts on others. This list provides an overview of those deals:

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
University of Oregon has a transformative agreement with ACM, meaning that UO authors don't pay any APCs.
Springer Hybrid and Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Open Publishing Agreement
No-APC publishing is now available to all University of Oregon authors for Springer Hybrid journals as part of our membership in BTAA. This is an unlimited publishing agreement with no caps or quotas. The approval process for the agreement is automatic; after UO Faculty indicate that they are affiliated with the University of Oregon, they will be given the option to publish the article open access at no additional cost in their publishing agreement.
Wiley and Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Open Publishing Agreement
Wiley and BTAA have an agreement which allows eligible authors to publish open access without paying an APC. As part of our agreement with Wiley, the University of Oregon receives an annual allotment of 40 credits for corresponding UO authors to publish gold open access in any fully open access or hybrid journal, at no charge. The approval process for UO authors is automatic.

General APC Assistance and Waivers

Some publishers that require fees for publishing now offer various waivers and discounts as direct offers for authors. It is important to search for these before submitting your work, as some require that you indicate interest at the time you submit. Others offer the option after your article has been accepted. All of the waivers and discounts that we have encountered so far have kept the financial request separate from the editorial process.

Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Cambridge University offers APC waivers or discounts for any author. After exploring all other sources of funding, authors can apply using the Cambridge Waiver or Discount Request Form.
MDPI
MDPI waives approximately 25% - 27% of APC fees every year with discounts ranging from 15% in the most established journals, up to 100% in newer or humanities journals. In many social sciences and humanities journals they waive between 70% - 100% of APCs. Authors can request a waiver with the editorial office when submitting their article.
PLOS
PLOS offers a Publication Fee Assistance Program to help authors unable to pay all or part of their publication fees and who can demonstrate financial need. Note that interested authors must apply for a waiver when submitting their article, rather than after.
SPIE
SPIE waives the open access fee on specific paper types, such as Reviews and Tutorials, as well as all articles for select titles.

Other OA resources

UO Article Processing Charge Award Fund
The OA-APC Fund is intended to support high quality open access publishing by the UO community.

We also support access to ArXiv, BioMed Central/SpringerOpen and more.