Transformative Agreements @ University of South Alabama

Why pay an APC?

*APCs are used by open access journals in lieu of subscription fees that libraries and readers traditionally have paid to gain access to research articles. Under the current three transformative agreements made possible by USA Libraries any and all APC's will be fully waived. 

• Visibility: Typically paying an APC leads to increased readership of your article through open access. Increased access has been shown to lead to increased citation rates as well. 
• Journal Quality: Authors may find that top-ranking journals charge APCs. 
• Copyright: APC-funded articles often* include provisions that allow the author to retain more rights to their work and also give readers additional usage rights. Creative Commons licenses ranging from attribution only to more strict non-commercial and/or no-derivatives versions.
• Compliance: If you are funded by a US Federal agency, you may find that publishing in an OA journal (with or without APCs) helps satisfy requirements to share the results of your research with US taxpayers. 
• Coverage: APC's are covered for University of South Alabama researches through the journals that fall under the Cambridge University Press, ACM Open and SpringerNature transformative agreement journal titles. 

*Every author should read their contract with their publisher, ask questions, and suggest changes.  A high quality journal will be very clear and open about their policies, including APCs - the cost, and any benefits that paying an APC gives authors. 

Why have I been asked to pay to publish my article? 

Article/Author Processing Charges (APCs) are charged to authors of scholarly articles during the publication process. APCs shift the burden of journal production costs (editing, peer review, hosting, archiving, preservation), to authors from readers. Paying an APC results in an article that is available to anyone with an internet connection. Corporate, non-profit, society, academic, and other publishers use a variety of models to meet their income needs and publishing service costs, and charging APCs is one model.

APCs should not be confused with page charges long associated with both print and digital publications. Page charges are used to cover administrative costs as well as the cost of print publication, but do not make the article available in an open access (OA) model.