Publishing gold open access without a fee – even when your paper doesn’t acknowledge a funder!

If you are suffering from ‘email fatigue’ following our campaign to ensure that papers acknowledging UKRI funding will meet their new open access policy, you may have missed some great news: you can publish gold open access without an APC (article processing charge) by publishing in a journal that is part of one of our ‘read and publish’ deals, even if your paper acknowledges a different funder, or even no funder at all!

There is a growing list of publishers you can choose from nowadays, including big publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer, as well as some of the more specialist publishers like ACS. To see a full list, visit our publisher deals page.

Cranfield researchers have already been making good use of the deals in 2022. So far, they have published 40 gold articles in Elsevier hybrid journals (those which publish a mix of gold and paywalled papers), and they have taken advantage of the 15% APC discount for fully gold journals on four occasions. They have also published 14 gold papers in Wiley journals with no APC fee.

Each deal has different terms and conditions, so make sure you read the small print carefully. Please do check with your Research Information Specialist if you aren’t sure that the journal you wish to publish in is included in a deal. We don’t want anyone to receive an invoice that they weren’t expecting! Clare, Emma, and Mandy are always happy to advise you.

Although each deal is different, they all have one thing in common – the corresponding author must be from Cranfield and use their Cranfield email address and affiliation on the paper. There is a slight difference here for Wiley journals, where the institution of the person who has the new role of ‘responsible corresponding author’ will be used to determine eligibility for the deal.

So, what are you waiting for? Why not check to see if your favourite journal is part of a deal? Or you could even investigate whether a journal that is a good fit for your manuscript is included in a deal.

We have put together a handy flowchart to help you comply with the UKRI policy if you need to – download it here:

Read our blog post to find out more about our publisher deals.

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash