Many OA journals charge authors a fee to publish their article. This Article Processing Charge (APC) covers the publishing costs normally recovered through journal subscriptions. APC charges are $2000 on average which can be a barrier to researchers, faculty, and students interested in, or required to publish in OA journals.
TRU Library is a member of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN). Because of this membership, authors publishing from TRU receive a discount on their article processing charge (APC) from several publishers. Check the list available at the link below when publishing to see if a discount applies. Note that for several publishers, authors must self-identify as eligible for the discount.
Details on publishers currently offering discounts or waived APC fees for TRU authors:
Publisher | Journal Titles | APC Discount or Waiver |
American Chemical Society | 85 titles | $250 USD discount on APC |
Cambridge University Press | 420 titles | APC fees waived for hybrid & gold OA journals |
Canadian Science Publishing | 5 titles | APC waived |
Canadian Science Publishing | 17 titles | 25% discount on APC |
Elsevier Science Direct | 2000+ titles | 20% discount on APC for most hybrid & gold OA journals |
Oxford University Press | 350 titles | APC waived for hybrid journals |
Royal Society of Chemistry | 30 titles | 15% discount on APC for hybrid journals |
SAGE Gold OA Journals | 100s of titles | 40% discount on APC |
SAGE Premier | 900 titles | APC waived |
Wiley | 100s of titles | APC waived |
Last updated: February 26, 2024.
Factors to Consider
Your colleagues, instructors, and advisors are excellent resources to help you identify potential journals. You may also want to consider submitting to one or more of the journals that you read in the course of your research.
A Call for Papers is a method used by publishers to gather articles, conference presentations, and book chapters for potential publication. While many calls for papers or presentations are from legitimate publishers, an increasing amount are from questionable publishers. See Predatory and Questionable Publishers to learn more.
On SHERPA/RoMEO, you can search for a journal to find out its OA policies. This is useful if you are required to (or would like to!) publish Open Access.
The following are factors to consider when choosing a journal:
This information adapted from OASPA's "Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing." Click through for additional factors to consider.
Refer to the tab Predatory and Questionable Publishers for information about recognizing predatory (questionable) publishers.
Open Access (OA) refers to materials that are available online free of charge and of licensing restrictions. More and more academic journals are moving towards various OA models instead of journals that charge subscribers (from individual academics to university libraries) steep fees.
Benefits of choosing a journal that is OA include:
Remember: Open Access does not equal predatory! Read more about predatory/questionable publications here.