Open Access is by definition free access, but conducting research and communicating the results costs money. Much innovative work in the OA movement is dedicated to resolving this dilemma.
Read the SPARC report Income Models for Open Access journals for more information about the various strategies being adopted by various OA journal providers. The report breaks down the models into supply side (payments made by or on behalf of the producers of scholarly information) and demand side (payments made by or on behalf of end users).
Article processing charge (APC) and Book processing charge (BPC) are payments charged by an Open Access publisher from the author or their institution to cover various publishing costs. Open Access Fees can be costly for researchers without access to institutional or grant funding. The following sections detail some ways researchers can cover those costs.
The University of New Mexico Libraries has a journal subscription agreement with Cambridge University Press that waives article processing charges for journals in their Cambridge Core. Researchers can use the checker tool located on their Read and Publish Agreements page to confirm eligibility. The aforementioned page also lists details and step-by-step guides.
If you are writing an extramural funding proposal, remember to budget for Open Access publishing fees. This can easily be justified as part of the research dissemination and broader impacts of your work, since open access publishing can extend the reach of your research. OA publishing fees can vary and tend to range from $0 to upward of $5,000, so explore which OA publishing options you plan to pursue to ensure you are budgeting an adequate amount. To comparison shop scholarly journals based on article influence and fees, check out this interactive Eigenfactor Index of Open Access Fees.
For help developing extramural funding proposals, including budgets, you can reach out to the Faculty Research Development Office (FRDO) by visiting the FRDO web page and clicking the Request Research Support button underneath the mission statement, which will open a short (5 or 6 questions) Qualtrics survey. Once it’s submitted, someone from FRDO will contact the requestor, usually within 24 hours.
Many journals have Open Access fee waivers. You can contact the journal you are interested in publishing with to see if this is a possibility.
Down below you'll find resources to check out if you are searching for help publishing Open Access:
University Presses with Open Models
Institutional repositories such as the UNM Digital Repository are a fast-growing way to deliver open access content.
A publisher's copyright policy will outline what sorts of archiving is allowed. Many publishers allow the archiving or submittal of pre-prints and/or post-prints of articles to repositories.
