How we support open access

As part of the UA Libraries Commitment to Open, we dedicate an increasing percentage of our information access budget each fiscal year to support national and international initiatives designed to transform how research and scholarship is shared.

We do this by:

  1. Supporting the publication costs of UA-affiliated authors
  2. Supporting initiatives and projects that advance open access and open research

How we support authors

We support UA-affiliated authors who publish in open access journals through institutional memberships and agreements with specific publishers. UA authors benefit from pre-arranged discounts or waivers on article processing charges.

Memberships and agreements

We have signed a transformative agreement with ACM for UA-affiliated corresponding authors that provides a complete waiver on all Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with open access publication in ACM journals. Authors who elect open access may select a Creative Commons license for article sharing and reuse. Authors can opt out of the open access arrangement and publish behind a paywall if they so choose.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: Research articles in all ACM journals, proceedings, and magazines
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Fees (APCs)
More information:

We have signed a transformative agreement with the Biochemical Society (Portland Press) covering publication in any of the Society’s seven journals.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals:

Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • UA corresponding authors should indicate their institutional affiliation as UA during the submission process. We highly recommend that UA authors also use their UA email address, as use of the UA email domain (@arizona.edu) also confirms the UA affiliation.

More information:

We are an institutional member of BioMed Central which entitles UA corresponding authors to a 15% discount on APCs for BioMed Central (BMC) and SpringerOpen titles.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: Any of the BMC or SpringerOpen journals
Discount or waiver: Fifteen percent (15%) off the Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

More information:

We have signed a Publish & Read agreement with BMJ that provides fully waived APCs for open access publication in any BMJ journal, beginning January 1, 2025.

Any article with a UA-affiliated corresponding author accepted for publication in any BMJ journal (including The BMJ and BMJ Case Reports) is eligible for open access publication at no charge.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All BMJ fully open access and hybrid (subscription journals that provide authors the option to pay to publish their articles open access) titles
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • During the submission of the article, the submitting author is responsible for correctly identifying the institutional affiliation of all authors, identifying the corresponding author, and providing institutional email addresses. BMJ’s submission system provides submitting authors with Ringgold-suggested institutional affiliations. Please use the drop-down menu to choose an appropriate University of Arizona affiliation (e.g., "College of Medicine Phoenix"). Corresponding authors must use their @arizona.edu email address.

More information:

We have signed a transformative Read and Publish agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP) that provides a complete waiver on all Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with open access publication.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All CUP Journals with an OA option. This agreement excludes small number of society-owned journals and articles ineligible for APCs (e.g., book reviews, editorial material)
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • UA-affiliated corresponding authors must indicate their UA institutional affiliation at the time of submission. We highly recommend that UA authors also use their UA email address, as use of the UA email domain (@arizona.edu) also confirms the UA affiliation.
  • UA authors will also have the option to retroactively convert articles published non-OA in CUP journals during the term of this agreement (through 2026). Any request to convert to OA must be made in the same year that the article was published.

More information:

We entered into an agreement with Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) that provides fully waived APCs for open access publication that went into effect on January 1, 2025. 

Any article with a UA-affiliated corresponding author accepted for publication in any CSP fully open access or hybrid journal is eligible for open access publication at no charge. The APC waiver will not be available retroactively for articles accepted for publication prior to 1/1/2025.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All CSP fully open access and hybrid (subscription journals that provide authors the option to pay to publish their articles open access) titles
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • During the submission of the article, the submitting author is responsible for correctly identifying the institutional affiliation of all authors, identifying the corresponding author, and providing institutional email addresses. CSP’s submission system provides submitting authors with Ringgold-suggested institutional affiliations. Please use "The University of Arizona" as the institutional affiliation name. Corresponding authors should also use their @arizona.edu email address.

More information:

We have signed a transformative agreement with the Company of Biologists that provide a complete waiver on all Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with open access publication.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals:

Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • UA-affiliated corresponding authors must indicate their UA institutional affiliation at the time of submission. Please use your UA email address, as use of the UA email domain (@arizona.edu) is required. The Guide for Authors provides a step-by-step guide to article submission.

Any article with a UA-affiliated corresponding author accepted for publication in any De Gruyter fully open access or hybrid journal is eligible for open access publication at no charge.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All De Gruyter fully open access and hybrid (subscription journals that provide authors the option to pay to publish their articles open access) titles
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • Corresponding authors must use their UA email address (@arizona.edu) and list the University of Arizona as their institutional affiliation.

More information:

We have signed an agreement with the Electrochemical Society that provides a complete waiver on all Article Processing Charges (APCs) for open access publication in 2 of the Society’s journals.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals:

Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • UA-authors must notify IOPScience (publisher of the ECS journals) of their eligibility for an APC waiver when submitting to the journal. We highly recommend that UA authors also use their UA email address, as use of the UA email domain (@arizona.edu) also confirms the UA affiliation.

More information:

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
The UA Libraries no longer has an open access publishing agreement with Frontiers Media. Frontiers has discontinued the institutional support plan model that we had been using for over 7 years. Our agreement with Frontiers ended on February 28, 2025.

Authors from the University of Arizona will no longer qualify for a discounted article processing charge (APC) based upon their affiliation with UA. Articles accepted for publication may be eligible for discounted or waived APCs based upon the institutional affiliations of the article's other authors.

We participate in IEEE’s OA OnDemand program that entitles UA corresponding authors to a 15% discount on APCs for publication in any of IEEE’s journals.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: Any of IEEE’s fully open access or hybrid journals
Discount or waiver: Fifteen percent (15%) off the Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • UA-affiliated corresponding authors should identify University of Arizona as their institutional affiliation and use their @arizona.edu email address.

More information:

We have signed a transformative agreement with IOP Publishing that fully waives open access publishing fees in any IOP journal.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All IOP journals
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • UA corresponding authors should indicate their institutional affiliation with University of Arizona during the submission process

More information:

John Benjamins Publishing is moving toward a fully open access publication model through Read & Publish agreements with research institutions worldwide. We have signed such an agreement and as of 1/1/2023, article processing charges (APCs) will be fully-waived for manuscript submissions from UA-affiliated corresponding authors accepted for publication in any John Benjamins portfolio of journals.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All John Benjamins journals
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • Corresponding authors must use their UA email address (@arizona.edu) and list the University of Arizona as their institutional affiliation at the time of submission

More information:

We participate in MDPI’s Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) through which UA-affiliated authors receive discounted article processing charges (APCs).

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All MDPI journals
Discount or waiver: 10% discount on APCs
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • Authors are prompted in the last step of submission process to determine if they are eligible for discounts under the MDPI IOAP program. The institution (UA) may be pre-selected if the author is submitting from within the network of the institution (IP range detection).

More information:

We have joined the Microbiology Society’s Read and Publish institutional deal that provides all UA-affiliated corresponding authors with fully-waived APCs for articles published in any of the Society’s six journals.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals:

  • Journal of General Virology
  • Journal of Medical Microbiology
  • International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology
  • Microbiology
  • Microbial Genomics
  • Access Microbiology

Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • Corresponding authors must use their UA email address (@arizona.edu)

More information:

We are an institutional member of PeerJ. The Library's "pre-payment account" covers the cost of a basic membership ($399) for each UA author that allows authors to publish one article per year for free with PeerJ.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated authors
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • When a paper is accepted for publication in PeerJ, University of Arizona authors should return to the UA PeerJ webpage to submit your claim for a Basic Membership and complete the email verification.
  • Please note: If you are using your PeerJ membership to cover the APCs, all authors of the accepted article must have a paid membership (See the PeerJ FAQs for more information.)

More information

  • Please visit the PeerJ-UA webpage for details about associating a PeerJ membership with UA.
  • If you do not see the discount applied or if you have questions, please contact Ellen Dubinsky at open-access@email.arizona.edu

Beginning January 1, 2025, UA-affiliated corresponding authors will be able to publish open access articles at no charge in all 14 PLOS journals. Our new agreement with PLOS expands open access options to the 6 PLOS titles that were not included in our prior agreements.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals:

Discount or waiver:

  • Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs) for UA-affiliated corresponding authors
  • 25% discount off APCs for UA-affiliated contributing authors for articles accepted for publication in PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, and PLOS Sustainability & Transformation, if the full APC is not covered by an agreement with the corresponding author’s institution.

How to receive the APC waiver:

  • When filling in the institutional affiliation fields during the manuscript submission process (using PLOS’s Editorial Manager system), use the drop-down menu to select University of Arizona. Do not override the drop-down menu.

More information:

We have signed an agreement with Rockefeller University Press that provides a complete waiver on all Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with open access publication in RUP's three hybrid journals.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals:

Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • To receive the APC waiver, UA corresponding authors should indicate their institutional affiliation as UA during the submission process and use their UA email domain (@arizona.edu).
  • RUP Read and Publish Agreement Author Experience (PDF)

We have signed a transformative Read and Publish agreement with the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) that provides a complete waiver on all Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with open access publication.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All RSC Journals with an OA option (both gold and hybrid titles)
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • UA-affiliated corresponding authors must state their affiliation with UA in both the article manuscript and the submission system workflow. We highly recommend that UA authors also use their UA email address, as use of the UA email domain (@arizona.edu) also confirms the UA affiliation.

More information:

We have signed an open access membership agreement with The Royal Society that provides all UA-affiliated corresponding authors with a full waiver on the article processing charges (APCs) for all Royal Society journals. This discount will apply to both the Royal Society fully open access journals and hybrid (partially open access) journals.

Eligible authors: All UA-affiliated corresponding authors
Eligible journals: All Royal Society journals
Discount or waiver: Full waiver (100%) of all Article Processing Charges (APCs)
How to receive the APC waiver:

  • When a UA author submits an article and selects an Open Access option on the Royal Society web site, they will be directed to a list of participating Member Institutions. Authors will then be asked to confirm whether their institution is a Member Institution and thus eligible for the APC discount.
  • We highly recommend that UA authors also use their UA email address, as use of the UA email domain (@arizona.edu) also confirms the UA affiliation.

More information:

How we support open access and research

We fund memberships and initiatives that have wide potential global impact, such as projects that develop open publication infrastructure or that convert portfolios of subscription-based peer-reviewed journals to open access.

Open access initiatives

We are a supporting member of arXiv, a free distribution service and an open-access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

We are supporting the collective action Bloomsbury Open Collection pilot in 2024. Through this model, Bloomsbury aims to make open access publication available to a wider range of authors by spreading the cost among participating institutions. In this first year, Bloomsbury is including titles in African Studies and International Development.

We are a member of COAR, an international association of libraries, universities, research institutions, government funders and others that works to support and advance the capacity, functionality, and future of open access repositories.

We are an academic library member of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

We are a Silver member of the DSpace community, one of several open-source technologies stewarded by Lyrasis. The DSpace digital repository platform preserves and enables easy and open access to all types of digital content including text, images, audio/visual material, and datasets.

The Global Press Archive CRL Alliance is an academic-commercial partnership between the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and East View Information Services. They have developed a series of thematically designed newspaper collections to provide access to rare, vernacular-language newspaper content from around the world.

Since 2021, we have supported Language Science Press in publishing 30 or more open access linguistics monographs per year with no author-facing book processing charges (BPCs). This support helps eliminates the financial barrier that many authors face when choosing open access publication. We have pledged to continue this support through 2026 via Knowledge Unlatched.

We are a founding institutional member of the Library Publishing Coalition, a community-led association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing. These library publishers preference open access dissemination and embrace new forms of scholarly communication.

We are a participating library in MIT Press's Direct to Open collective action model for open access publication of monographs. This funding initiative provides open access publication of all new MIT Press scholarly monographs starting in 2022 with no out-of-pocket costs for authors.

OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. OAPEN provides services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) was established by the OAPEN Foundation in 2012. DOAB is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in open access.

We are an academic library member of the Open Book Collective (OBC), an organization that brings together open access book publishers, open publishing service providers, and knowledge institutions, including libraries, working in collaboration to secure a sustainable and equitable future for open access books.

As members of OBC we are providing support to:

We are a library member of Open Book Publishers (OBP), one of the largest independent open access academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Through our membership, all UA faculty, students, and staff have free access to the various formatted digital editions of every one of OBP’s titles.

We have joined the Open Library of Humanities' Library Partnership Subsidy system. Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges – the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee.

We are a member of the Open Textbook Network (OTN) which promotes access, affordability, and student success through the use of open textbooks.

Path to Open, a collaboration between JSTOR and university presses, addresses the challenges of funding open access books in the humanities and social sciences. Participating libraries contribute funds that enable participating presses to publish new books that will transition from licensed to open access within three years of publication.

We invest in PhilPapers, the online research hub in philosophy that serves as an open access aggregator and archive.

We are a charter member of PsyArXiv, the preprints database for the psychological sciences.

We are a Supporting Library Member of punctum books, an open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing.

Reveal Digital uses a library crowd-funding model in which libraries pool funds to develop open access curated primary source collections. We have contributed to the Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s collection and are currently contributing to the Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements collection.

We are a participant in SCOAP3, the international partnership of 3,000 libraries, funders, and research institutions working to convert journals in the field of high energy physics to open access at no cost for authors.

We are a member of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an advocacy organization and international alliance of nearly 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.

We partner with several publishers that have switched to a Subscribe to Open (S2O) publication model. S2O allows publishers to convert journals from paywalled to open access, one year at a time. Rather than relying on author-facing charges (article processing charges) to underwrite the cost of open access publication, S2O asks institutional customers to continue their subscriptions. When a target number of subscribers participate, the publisher opens the content covered by that year’s subscription revenue.

Our S2O support includes:

TRAIL identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted open access to U.S. government agency technical reports.

We are a participating library in the University of Michigan Press’ new model of collaborative funding for open access monograph publication with no author fees. Fund to Mission aims at converting at least 75% of its monographs to open access by the end of 2023.

Suggestions?

Do you know of an open access project that you think we should support? Have you heard of another publisher that offers prearranged discounted article processing charges? Please share your ideas about how the Libraries can promote open access. Contact us at open-access@email.arizona.edu.