While it is usually possible to make your work openly available at no cost, some publishers require the payment of an open access article processing charge (APC). This payment means that your work will be open immediately upon publication with a Creative Commons licence, via the publisher's website.
Some journals are fully open access, meaning that you will always have to pay an APC to publish in them. Other publishers operate a 'hybrid' model in subscription journals which means you can choose to publish either in the traditional manner where the work will sit behind a paywall, or you can pay an APC to make your article freely accessible. APCs usually range between £800 and £2000, though they can be higher or lower. The average charge has been estimated by UKRI to be £1727 (exc. VAT).
The Library has purchased a number of open access agreements and memberships with publishers - listed below under Open access transformative deals, memberships and pre-payment agreements. Some of these allow University of Bath corresponding authors to publish open access in their eligible journals with no charge, and others provide discounts on the cost of APCs. Publishers will normally notify you of this option, if available, at the submission or acceptance stage, and your request will be sent to our dashboard for approval. We sign up to new agreements each year and details are added to the list. Please contact the open access team if you require more information on these OA transformative deals.
This page provides information on the funding options available to cover these charges and will help you determine whether you are eligible for funding support. If you have any queries about your eligibility please contact the Open Access Team at openaccess@bath.ac.uk.
Before making a request, please look over the information provided on the rest of this page regarding funding eligibility - including specific funder information. Please also check the publisher-specific open access agreements we have signed up to (listed below). Taking advantage of these deals may mean we get significant reduction in the price of your APC.
Please make sure that you have funding in place before submitting to your chosen journal or committing to pay any open access charges. If you have any questions regarding funding options or eligibility, then please contact openaccess@bath.ac.uk.
To request financial support for the payment of your article processing charge (APC), we request that authors submit details via our APC request form. Having this formal record of your request helps when processing invoices and reporting to funding bodies.
After receiving your request we will check that the publication meets the requirements of your funder and also whether funding is available. We will then send you an email confirming whether we can support the payment from either our UKRI or COAF block grant or the Bath Open Access Fund. We endeavour to respond to your request as soon as possible.
If we are unable to support the APC through either of our funds, we will provide guidance on how you can still make your work openly available.
If we can support the payment, we will provide instructions on how to proceed with requesting and paying for the open access fee.
The details of your request will be recorded on our database so that we can tie up the details and approve payment when the invoice arrives. Please note that the offer of financial support relates specifically to this article being published in this journal. The offer of support is not transferrable. If you resubmit the same article to another journal, you will need to contact us and re-apply for support.
If we do not have a pre-payment account with your publisher, we prefer that payment be made via invoice and not credit card. Once the invoice has been received and approved, Finance aim to make payments on, or as close as possible, to the due date, which is traditionally 30 days after the invoice date. If you receive any payment reminders, please also forward these to us to deal with.
As Library funds are very limited, we would be grateful if you could keep us updated with regard to the publication status of your paper. Please let us know straight away if the funds are no longer needed so that we can reallocate them. If payment has not been requested by the journal, or we have not heard from you by 30 June of the current financial year, we will automatically assume the funds can be reallocated to a new applicant and the offer of funding will be withdrawn.
Page/colour/submission charges - please note that the APC request form does not cover these. We are not able to pay any additional non-open access publication charges from the COAF fund nor the Bath Open Access fund. You and your co-authors must find an alternative source of funds for this or ask the publisher for a waiver. We can contribute only limited funds from the UKRI block grant towards these costs (max £750 per article). Please check with the open access team before agreeing to pay these charges to the publisher.
UPDATE 10 August 2021! The UKRI open access block grant is very nearly exhausted for 2021/2. This is due to a very high demand for funds and an increased level of publication activity between April and August 2021. We have a large number of commitments on the fund and would appreciate it if you could let us know if you have requested APC funding for a specific article but no longer require this. Please explore the possibility of submitting to a journal in one of our open access transformative agreements (see details of relevant publishers below) or using the green (self-archiving) route to open access if compliant in your chosen journal. If you have any queries, please email openaccess@bath.ac.uk
Please note that we are not able to cover additional publication costs (eg page and colour charges) from the UKRI block grant for the remainder of this funding period (up to and including 31/3/2022). We apologise for any disappointment caused.
If you have any concerns or questions please contact us.
If you have been funded by a Research Council then you may be able to access our UKRI Open Access block grant. Whilst we encourage authors to self-archive their author accepted manuscript in Pure where possible, we understand that sometimes it is necessary for an OA fee to be paid so the article is open immediately.
Please read the below information as it may affect whether we can support your APC.
Please make sure that you have funding in place before submitting to your chosen journal or committing to pay any open access charges.
To be eligible to use the fund:
Publishers taking a sustainable and affordable approach to the transition to OA by reducing the cost of publishing in hybrid journals via offsetting deals and membership schemes include: American Chemical Society, BMJ, Royal Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, Institute of Physics, Sage, Springer Nature (Springer Compact titles only), Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Oxford University Press.
Further requirements:
Please note: The fund will cover up to three APCs per author/grant per annual block grant allocation (01 April – 31 March).
Page charges and other mandatory costs can also be paid under UKRI policy at the discretion of the individual institution.
To make a formal request for support from this fund, please fill out our APC request form.
From January 2021 onwards Wellcome will continue to provide support for eligible OA costs to ensure compliance with their new policy and will supplement individual research grants for this purpose. You need to contact Wellcome at openaccess@wellcome.org direct, and request funding. You will need to provide the name of the journal, title of the paper, cost of the APC and your grant reference number(s).
The open access team can advise on Wellcome open access policy and green open access via Pure.
The other COAF charities will be funding open access payments via block grants to eligible institutions or via additional funds within research grants.
Versus Arthritis - funded authors should make open access funding requests directly to Versus Arthritis via their Grant Tracker account.
British Heart Foundation (BHF) have provided a small open access block grant to fund APCs for BHF-funded papers - please use our APC Request form to apply for funding.
Authors funded by any of the other charities should contact their funder using the email address listed below.
Links to COAF charities' open access policies:
the publisher has agreed to COAF's publisher requirements (a requirement since 1 April 2017)
Wellcome Trust also mandates that monographs and book chapters be made open access. It has a separate funding mechanism to manage payment of these costs for its funded researchers. Please email openaccess@wellcome.ac.uk for more information.
Other COAF charities: if you need help with funding an open access payment you should contact your relevant research funder(s) directly. The email addresses are:
APCs for European Research Council-funded works can be claimed as direct eligible costs from your grant if publication is expected during the period of the grant. For more information, read the ERC guidelines.
Grant-holders must ensure open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to their funding. Horizon 2020 research can be made open access using the green route: uploading a copy of the author’s accepted manuscript to a repository, such as Pure, by the date of publication at the latest. However, this can only be done if the journal offers a 6 month embargo. A 12 month embargo is acceptable for publications in the social sciences and humanities. Horizon 2020 provide an amendment to publishing agreement that authors and publishers can sign to ensure authors have the rights they need to comply. The gold (paid) route is also acceptable. Article processing charges can be reimbursed by Horizon 2020 if they occur during the duration of the grant. Costs incurred once a project is completed cannot be refunded from that project's budget. The article must still be uploaded to an appropriate repository. For more information, visit the Horizon 2020 website or speak to a member of the Open Access Team.
The Foundation is willing to pay reasonable publisher fees in order to make publications openly available immediately via a CC-BY 4.0 licence. Researchers should not pay these fees out of their budget or seek reimbursement from the Foundation. They should use Chronos, a new service developed by the foundation, to manage the payment of open access fees.
The Society will not provide any additional funding to support open access costs. If your grant finishes with an underspend they are happy to consider requests for it to be used for APCs.
The Bath open access fund is available to University of Bath staff and research postgraduates who do not have research funding. Further details of eligibility criteria are below. If you think your article is eligible and you'd like to apply for funding, please submit our online APC request form.
If you aren't funded by a Research Council, Wellcome/COAF partner, or other funding body which may be able to pay for your open 
access fee, then you may have the option of using the Bath Open Access Fund.
The Library’s Open Access Team can advise on whether your journal is eligible (email details to openaccess@bath.ac.uk).
Please submit your request via our APC request form. Having this formal record of your request helps when processing invoices and reporting to funding bodies.
Please note: funding is allocated on a first-come first-served basis so we cannot guarantee that funds will always be available. Since many journals require you to agree to the payment when you submit your article, it is a good idea to ensure you have funding before you proceed with the submission process. Do not commit to paying an APC until you have received confirmation of funding from the Open Access team.
The funding year is 1 August to 31 July and all invoices must be received by the open access team by 30 June each year in order to be paid during the funding period. Please forward all invoices and reminders to openaccess@bath.ac.uk
If your request for funding is approved, we will earmark the amount of the APC for you until the invoice is paid. If your article is not accepted by the journal, or you no longer require funding for the specified article, please let the team know as soon as possible. Funding is approved for a specified article in a specified journal - it cannot be transferred to a different one.
NOTE: the Bath Open Access Fund is used for the payment of open access article processing charges (APCs) and cannot be used to pay additional publication charges such as page, colour or submission charges. These remain the responsibility of the author and/or their department.
If your article does not meet the criteria for funding support for paid open access, there are still a number of things that you can do:
The University of Bath has signed up to a number of publisher agreements which may mean the cost of the APC is reduced or waived. If you are considering publishing with one of the below publishers, please read about what agreement we have in place and whether you might be able to benefit from it. If in doubt, please contact openaccess@bath.ac.uk for further information.
Full details of publisher open access agreements can be found below:
The 2021 deal with ACS has now ended and there are no Open Access tokens remaining. We are currently negotiating a new Read & Publish agreement with ACS. If you wish to publish Open Access in an ACS journal, please complete and submit an APC request form. We will update this page when the agreement is in place.
We have a JISC Read & Publish agreement with AIP from 2021-2023. This provides Bath corresponding authors with cost-free open access publishing of research articles in any of AIP’s hybrid journals. Hybrid journals are journals which offer the option to publish either Open Access or with subscription access. When submitting, please ensure that you are listed as the corresponding author, with a Bath affiliation and e-mail address entered into the publisher’s submission system. At the acceptance stage you will be asked to confirm your affiliation and that you wish to publish open access via the agreement. Please select the CC-BY licence when prompted. Your request will be sent to the open access team for approval.
Our agreement with Bentham is that corresponding authors affiliated with the University of Bath who submit an article to a Bentham Science open access journal or select the open access option in a hybrid journal will receive a 40% discount on the article processing charge (APC). Please ensure that you are listed as the corresponding author, with a Bath affiliation and e-mail address entered into the publisher’s submission system. Please select the CC-BY licence when prompted.
We have a pre-payment account with BMC which is available for use by Bath corresponding authors who do not have Research Council or Wellcome Trust funding. To access this account you will need to complete our online APC request form - available from the link above. Please use your University of Bath email address. If eligible, the Open Access team will provide you with a membership code which you then quote to the publisher. If you are funded by a Research Council or the Wellcome Trust you may still be able to publish open access with this publisher, however payment will be via invoice.
We have signed up to a Publish & Read (pilot) agreement with BMJ from 1 Feb 2021 to 31 Dec 2022. This is exclusively for original articles reporting on primary research which is funded by the following: UKRI, Wellcome Trust, British Heart Foundation, Blood Cancer UK, Cancer Research UK, Parkinsons UK, Versus Arthritis. It includes only hybrid (subscription) journals - 28 in total: Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, Archives of Disease in Childhood, ADC: Education & Practice ADC: Fetal & Neonatal BMJ Quality & Safety British Journal of Ophthalmology, British Journal of Sports Medicine, Emergency Medicine Journal, BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, Evidence-Based Mental Health, Evidence-Based Nursing, Frontline Gastroenterology, Gut, Heart, Injury Prevention, Journal of Medical Ethics, Medical Humanities, Journal of Clinical Pathology, Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, Journal of Medical Genetics, Journal of Neuro Interventional Surgery, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, Practical Neurology, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Postgraduate Medical Journal, Sexually Transmitted Infections, Thorax, Tobacco Control. Please use your University of Bath email address when submitting; you will need to verify your Bath open access agreement affiliation and your request will be sent to the OA team for eligibility checks. The cost will then be covered via the agreement at acceptance, and your article published open access with a CC-BY licence. Our existing pre-payment account with BMJ will run alongside this, and is available to all Bath corresponding authors who do not have research funding. It covers only fully open access journals. Please complete our online APC request form prior to submission. On submission to the journal please use your University of Bath email address. and select your open access agreement affiliation: your ‘agreement name’ or ‘institution’ will be available to select in the dropdown options. Please select the CC-BY licence. Upon acceptance, the open access team we will review your request from our central dashboard. If approved, you will receive a confirmation email from RightsLink®. Papers with a Bath corresponding author but not eligible for either agreement will receive a 25% discount.
The University of Bath Library has signed a Read and Publish deal with IOP. This deal enables unlimited open access publishing for University of Bath corresponding authors in 44 of IOP’s subscription journals, without barriers or charges to authors. A list of IOP journals included in this deal can be found here. Please use your University of Bath email address on all submissions and select the CC-BY licence when prompted. For journals not included in this list, please make a request via our APC form.
Journal articles with a corresponding author affiliated to the University of Bath are eligible for a 10% discount on article processing charges (APCs). This agreement is available for all Bath authors. Please use your University of Bath email address when submitting. This discount applies automatically when submitting to the journal. If you wish the APC to be paid from the UKRI, Wellcome Trust or BHF block grants, or from the Bath Open Access Fund - please apply for funding via the APC request form. The journal must be a Q1 title as measured by the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports or SCImago Journal Rankings. For further information on MDPI APCs, please follow this link
The program also grants authors a reduction on the Book Processing Charges (BPCs) for MDPI Books (http://www.mdpi.com/books).
We have signed up to the JISC OUP Read & Publish deal from March 2021. This provides University of Bath corresponding authors with open access publishing of original research or review articles in the majority of OUP's hybrid and fully open access journals. List of journals included in the deal is here. Please use your University of Bath email address and affiliation when submitting. When asked to select a licence, please be aware that research funders require a CC-BY licence – not CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND. If you are not presented with the CC BY licence option, then please email openaccess@bath.ac.uk and let us know. If your article is in receipt of UKRI, Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK or British Heart Foundation, please ensure the research funders' names and grant numbers are provided. Detailed author instructions are available here. Any enquiries about the OUP deal should be addressed to: openaccess@bath.ac.uk or via the APC request form.
We have a pre-payment account with PeerJ which is available for use by all Bath affiliated authors. This works on a membership basis. Please apply for funding via the APC Request form.
We have signed up to a PLOS Flat Fee Arrangement from 1 April 2021 until December 2023. This is a prepay arrangement which means that publication fees for open access will be automatically covered by the flat fee agreement for the following 6 titles: PLOS ONE, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Pathogens, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLOS Digital Health, PLOS Climate, PLOS Water, and PLOS Global Public Health.
For 2022 we will be signing up to a Community Action Publishing agreement with PLOS which includes cost-free publishing for Bath corresponding authors in PLOS Medicine, PLOS Biology and PLOS Sustainability and Transformation.
To be eligible for full payment of publication fees, the corresponding author must be affiliated with the University of Bath. Please ensure that you use your University of Bath email address and identify your affiliation in the publisher submission system. Articles will be automatically published with a with a CC-BY licence ; PLOS articles are syndicated to PubMed Central/Europe PMC and PLOS requires data sharing where not subject to legal or ethical restrictions. PLOS is a non-profit, fully open access publisher.
We have signed up to a JISC Read & Publish agreement with the National Academy of Sciences which allows all University of Bath corresponding authors to publish open access with a CC-BY licence in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). When you submit to the journal, ensure that you are listed as the corresponding author, with a Bath affiliation and e-mail address entered into the publisher’s submission system. You will receive an e-mail confirming that the paper will be published open access under the CC-BY licence without any additional publicataion fees.
Our agreement with Portland Press allows all University of Bath corresponding authors to publish open access with a CC-BY licence in Portland Press's five subscription and two fully open access journals: Biochemical Journal, Biochemical Society Transactions, Bioscience Reports, Clinical Science, Essays in Biochemistry, Emerging Topics in Life Sciences, and Neuronal Signalling. When you submit to the journal, ensure that you are listed as the corresponding author, with a Bath affiliation and e-mail address entered into the publisher’s submission system. You will receive an e-mail confirming that the paper will be published open access under the CC-BY licence without any additional fees.
We have an annual agreement that provides 25% off the cost of an APC for the following journal titles: Biology Letters, Interface Focus, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, and Open Biology, and Royal Society Open Science. Open to all Bath corresponding authors. Please use your University of Bath email address when submitting. You will be asked to confirm the publication licence: please make sure to select the CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution) licence.
NOTE - 12/1/2022: our Read & Publish agreement with RSC has ended and JISC are in the process of negotiating a new agreement. If you wish to publish open access in an RSC journal, please contact the open access team - openaccess@bath.ac.uk in the first instance.
The Royal Society of Chemistry publishes journals in chemical science subjects, multidisciplinary studies and related disciplines, including engineering and nanotech. If you are the corresponding author for an article in an RSC hybrid journal then, as a member of the University of Bath, you will not have to pay open access article processing charges. You simply need to tell the RSC that you wish the article to be made open access with a CC-BY licence . This is because the library have signed up to a 'Read and Publish' agreement with the RSC. This transformative open access agreement means that the Library have paid an annual amount to the publisher to cover both our online subscription to RSC journals and the open access publishing fees for University of Bath corresponding authors. This waiver of open access fees applies to all RSC hybrid (subscription) journals except: Chemical Science, RSC Advances, Nanoscale Advances, RSC Chemical Biology, Materials Advances and Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP). Please use your University of Bath email address on all submissions and select the CC-BY licence when prompted. Note that RSC fully open access journals are not included in this agreement. Please apply for funding using our APC Request form
We have signed a Read & Publish agreement for unlimited open access publishing in Sage's subscription journals. In addition, authors publishing in any of Sage's fully open access journals will receive a 20% discount on the open access article processing charge. All University of Bath corresponding authors can publish open access in almost all Sage, IMechE and RSM subscription journals. This encompasses original research papers, review papers, brief communications, short reports and case studies. Book reviews, editorials, abstracts and news items are excluded. A list of journals included in this deal can be found here . On submission to the journal, please ensure that you are listed as the corresponding author and provide your University of Bath affiliation and email address. This enables Sage to identify your paper as eligible for open access. The Library OA team will receive a request to approve the article for funding. Note: if you are not correctly identified as the corresponding author, Sage may not be able to convert your article to open access later. Once approved, Sage will inform co-authors that the article can be published open access at no additional cost. Within 14 days, one author must confirm that the authors agree to publish open access, and choose a licence. If the funder of the paper requires a CC-BY licence, please ensure that you select it. Most funders require CC-BY and this is our recommended choice of licence for OA papers. Sage, IMechE and RSM papers in gold (fully open access) journals are eligible for a discount on standard rates. Please use our online APC request form to apply for funding. University of Bath’s normal eligibility criteria apply.
We have signed up to a JISC Read & Publish deal with Taylor & Francis from April 2021. If you are the corresponding author for a research article in a Taylor and Francis 'Open Select' hybrid journal see list: here in any subject area then, as a member of the University of Bath, you are eligible for open access publishing with CC-BY licence . Please use your University of Bath email address on all submissions and select the CC-BY licence when prompted. Note that a number of Taylor & Francis journals are excluded – notably those that charge an Article Processing Charge of over £3000 (known as Premium journals).
We also have a pre-payment account with Taylor and Francis which covers APCs in journals outside of the Read & Publish deal. This is available to all UKRI funded Bath corresponding authors. If you are not UKRI funded then you may still be able to publish open access in these journals; payment will be via invoice. Please use our online APC request form - available from the link above - to apply for funding.
We have been participating in a JISC Read & Publish deal with Wiley since March 2020.
The agreement is available to Bath-affiliated corresponding authors and provides open access publishing with a CC-BY licence of primary research and non-commissioned review articles in any of Wiley’s fully gold open access or hybrid OnlineOpen journals at no further charge to the author.You will need to select the institutional open access option at the submission stage for fully gold journals or at the acceptance stage via the Wiley Author Service platform for hybrid journals. Please use your University of Bath email address on all submissions. You will also need to provide details of any funders acknowledged in your work. Your request will be sent to our dashboard for assessment by the Open Access team.
A list of Wiley’s fully gold journals included in the deal can be found here . A list of Wiley’s hybrid (subscription) journals that offer OnlineOpen included in the deal can be found here . For journals not included in this list, there is a 25% discount on the APC. Please make a request via our APC form.
All queries about publishing open access in Wiley's journals should be addressed to: openaccess@bath.ac.uk
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