Article Processing Charges (APCs) are fees charged to authors of scholarly articles during publication. Libraries and authors pay APCs for publishers to publish open access journals instead of subscription fees that libraries traditionally paid for faculty, students, and researchers to gain access to research articles. By paying APCs, scholarly articles are available to anyone with internet access. This publishing model shifts the burden of journal production costs (editing, peer review, hosting, archiving, preservation) to authors from readers. 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 associated with both print and digital publications. Page charges cover administrative costs as well as the cost of print publication but do not make the article available in an open access (OA) model.
Article processing charge (APC) support, the adoption of open access policies, and the signing of transformative open access agreements with publishers (of native OA and hybrid journals) are intended to help further the UC goal of immediate and open access to publications by UC authors. The transformative open access agreements that UC has negotiated with hybrid publishers, as well as the open access (OA) agreements that have been negotiated with native OA publishers, reduce or completely cover the APC costs for the respective publishers. Article processing charge support is available through UC transformative open access agreements and the UCSB Open Access Publishing Fund.
All University of California corresponding authors can use these publishing discounts, negotiated by the California Digital Library. Authors can search the UC Journal Open Access Lookup Tool (JOLT) to see if a UC agreement covers a specific journal and the extent of available funding support. Moreover, the UCSB Open Access Fact Sheet has information to assist authors in budgeting for open access publishing when creating their research grant proposal.
The UCSB Open Access Publishing Fund supports authors who want to make their research open to readers immediately upon publication. After applying and being approved, eligible authors will be reimbursed for article processing charges (APCs) for articles published in eligible journals.
