Western Libraries Financial Support for Open Access
This support includes institutional memberships with Open Access (OA) publishers or organizations that develop open infrastructure. Memberships with publishers often provide a discount on the Article Processing Charge (APC) for Western's researchers. We no longer provide an OA Fund to pay for APCs.
The Western Libraries' Open Access Journal Finder helps you find important information about journals in your field such as:
Memberships that provide discounts for Article Processing Charges
| Publisher | Discount and Instructions |
|---|---|
| American Chemical Society |
$250 USD discount for Western-affiliated authors as part of our subscription package with ACS. The discount is applied on submission of manuscript. Authors must identify their affiliation with Western to qualify for the discount. |
| Cambridge University Press |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors as part of our negotiated license with Cambridge. The discount is applied on submission of manuscript. Corresponding authors from the institutions will be identified using their official affiliated email domains. The following article types are included: research, reviews, rapid communications, brief reports, case reports. |
| Canadian Science Publishing |
APCs covered for five journals as part of our negotiated license with CSP:
All other journals have a 25% discount on APCs. The discount is applied on submission of manuscript. Authors must identify their affiliation with Western to qualify for the discount. |
| Cogitatio Press |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors. Authors must identify their affiliation with Western on submission of manuscript. |
| Company of Biologists |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors. Authors must identify their affiliation with Western on submission of manuscript. |
| De Gruyter |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors. Authors must identify their affiliation with Western on submission of manuscript. |
| Elsevier |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors for Core Hybrid and Specialty journals (all titles that operate on the hybrid subscription model) as part of our negotiated license with Elsevier. APCs for journals published on the gold OA model (entirely funded by APCs) receive the following discounts: 20% in 2024, 15% in 2025/2026, and 10% in 2027. Eligibility for the APC waivers in Core Hybrid and Specialty titles is effective upon acceptance of articles beginning on January 1, 2024. Authors will be notified of their eligibility upon acceptance of their article in an eligible journal and their declaration of their affiliation with a participating CRKN member institution. |
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APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors as part of our negotiated license with IOP. Article types that are included are paper, special issue paper, review, and letter. Please note that there are a select few journals for which IOP cannot offer an open access option that are excluded at this time. Please see the title list file for details. |
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APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors as part of our negotiated license with Microbiology Society. Corresponding authors from the institutions will be identified using their official affiliated email domains. |
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APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors for all journals that operate on the hybrid subscription model as part of our negotiated license with Oxford. 10% discount on APCs for journals published on the gold OA model (entirely funded by APCs). Eligibility for the APC waivers in Core Hybrid and Specialty titles is effective upon acceptance of articles beginning on February 1, 2024. Authors will be notified of their eligibility upon acceptance of their article in an eligible journal and their declaration of their affiliation with a participating CRKN member institution. |
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Western-affiliated authors can publish an unlimited number of articles with PeerJ at no cost to them. Corresponding authors from the institutions will be identified using their official affiliated email domains. Visit Western's PeerJ profile to learn more. |
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| PLOS |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated corresponding authors who publish in any PLOS journal. Authors must identify their affiliation with Western on submission of manuscript. |
| Royal Society |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors as part of our negotiated license with Royal Society. |
| Royal Society of Chemistry |
As of January 1, 2025, Western authors can publish articles in hybrid and gold journals under an open access license with no associated APC. |
| SAGE |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors for most SAGE journals (all those that operate on the hybrid subscription/OA model) and 40% discount on APCs for journals published on the gold OA model (entirely funded by APCs) as part of our negotiated license with SAGE. Authors must identify their affiliation with Western on submission of manuscript. The discount will be applied when the article is accepted. In the SAGE Open Access Portal, authors can then accept or decline to publish their article open access. |
| Taylor & Francis (T&F) |
25% discount on APCs in T&F Open Select journals for Western-affiliated authors as part of our negotiated license with Taylor & Francis. Authors should choose the open access publishing option when they submit their article. When the APC is generated, select Western from the drop-down menu of institutions and the discount will be automatically applied. |
| Wiley |
APCs covered for Western-affiliated authors for most Wiley journals (all those that operate on the hybrid subscription/OA model) as part of our negotiated license with Wiley. No discount on APCs for journals published on the gold OA model (entirely funded by APCs). Upon article acceptance for publication in a hybrid journal, the corresponding author will begin the Author Services process within the Wiley Open Access Account system. A customized message notifies the author upon login that their accepted article is eligible for open access at no cost. Authors that complete the Author Services process prior to January 15, 2023, will not qualify for eligibility. |
Western researchers are not required to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) in order to publish Open Access. Journals with no APCs are indexed in the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals).
Memberships that support open infrastructure
| Organization | Description |
|---|---|
| arXiv |
A preprints server and archive for physics, math, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Western Libraries is a supporting member of arXiv. |
| Bioline International |
Provides OA to quality research journals published in developing countries. |
| Canadian Association of Learned Journals | Supports academic journal publishing in Canada. Western Libraries' membership supports our OA journal publishing. |
| Canadiana Online |
Western Libraries supports Canadiana Online through the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN). Our contributions support CRKN's work to remove the subscription paywall for Canadiana content and improve discovery of the content. |
| Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) |
DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, OA, peer-reviewed journals. |
| Erudit |
A Canadian publisher and disseminator of Social Sciences and Humanities publications. Western Libraries also supports Erudit's Partnership for Open Access, which provides continuous financial support to Canadian publishers in transition toward complete OA. |
| Library Publishing Coalition | An independent, community-led association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing. |
| Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) | An international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Our membership supports the growth of high-quality ETD repositories and supports harvesting Western’s ETDs into the NDLTD Union Catalog, thereby increasing their visibility. |
| Open Book Publishers | A UK-based OA publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our membership provides free e-book downloads and discounted prices for all titles. |
| Open Library of the Humanities (OLH) | OLH supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines. OLH does not charge any author fees. Western Libraries' membership goes towards OLH costs. |
| ORCID | ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) for researchers. Western Libraries is a member of ORCID through ORCID-CA, the ORCID Consortium in Canada. |
| PhilPapers |
An index and bibliography of philosophy with the largest OA archive for this subject area. |
| Public Knowledge Project |
Develops free open source software, including Open Journal Systems (OJS), which Western Libraries uses to provide OA journal publishing. |
| Readalyc Amelica |
An Open Access journal index and article-hosting platform for scholarly Open Access journals published in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal. Redalyc includes journal quality assessment processes, full-text articles' hosting, automatic editorial workflow, technology, metrics, and author-level services. |
| Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) |
SCOAP3 converts high-quality subscription journals in High-Energy Physics to OA journals by redirecting subscription costs. |
| SPARC | A global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education. |
| The Programming Historian | The Programming Historian was founded in 2008 by William J. Turkel and Alan MacEachern, both professors of history at Western University. It is a volunteer-led initiative that publishes and disseminates novice-friendly, peer-reviewed publications and tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. Content is published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Through its institutional partnership, Western supports the creation and dissemination of globally focused open scholarship. |
| Ubiquity Press | An OA publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books, and data. Our membership supports OA to their content, and provides better access for Western's researchers through MARC records and COUNTER reports. |
Criteria for Open Access memberships
Western Libraries will consider memberships or other financial support for OA initiatives that meet these criteria:
- Membership should send a clear message of support for organizations and business models that seek to shift scholarly communications away from commercial or closed access models of for-profit publishing and scholarly infrastructure.
- Initiatives must have transparent and viable business models.
- The subjects covered must be relevant to Western's scholars.
- The initiative should adhere to best practices for scholarly publishing, such as those provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
- For memberships that require APCs, the membereship should provide good value for money. For example, a reasonable fee based on the number of articles that Western's researchers publish.
- Memberships that provide APC discounts for hybrid journals will not be considered, even if the membership also provides APC discounts for fully OA journals. Hybrid journals are those that require a subscription to access all content but also request APC payments from authors who wish to make an individual article open.
- Western Libraries is not expected to cover the (full or partial) cost of APCs.
Special consideration will be given to:
- Venues in which Western's researchers are contributing or publishing.
- Initiatives that support scholars in traditionally under-funded disciplines, such as the Humanities or Social Sciences.
- Initiatives that demonstrate a commitment to accessibility, privacy, equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization.
- Organizations and initiatives that align with Western's mission and strategic priorities.
As many large journal publishers are adopting Read+Publish and Subscribe to Open agreements we continue to assess how these deals align with the above criteria. Since these agreements also include access to subscribed content there are additional factors to consider.
