Submit to Open Access Journals

Open access journals are peer-reviewed journals that provide free, online access to their articles. They do not charge subscription fees to readers or libraries, rather, they cover costs through publication fees, institutional subsidies, endowments, or sponsorships. There are more than 1200 open access peer-reviewed scholarly journals. There are also hybrid models that allow open access to some of their material and recover their costs from a mixture of author charges, institutional memberships and print subscriptions.

See the list of UC discounts on publication fees below, a description of this and other alternatives and our table of the characteristics of scholarly publishing options.

Submission to an open access journal is certain to remove the financial access barriers for potential readers of your work. Although open access journals are relatively new, evidence to date suggests that publishing with them may increase the reach and impact of your work.

To help you consider submitting your work to these journals:

• Take advantage of the following UC institutional memberships:

  UC Discounts on Article Publication Charges for Open Access Journals - 2007 (revised 8/21/07)

  Publisher or Publication	Normal publication fee	UC discounted fee	Based on
  BioMed Central (all BioMed Central journals)	~ $1375 average "Article Processing Fee"	~ $1170 (15% discount)	Supporting membership; Reveiwers for articles receive 20% discount for their own articles
  Nucleic Acids Research (from Oxford Univ. Press)	$1900	$950 (50% discount)	Institutional memberships
  Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)	$1000 (to provide open access; separate from page and other charges)	$750 (25% discount)	Included as part of UC's online subscription
  Public Library of Science	$1250 - $2750	10% discount	UC-affiliated corresponding author; Institutional membership

• Consult the list of more than 2,800 peer-reviewed open access journals, many with citation rates and impact factors equivalent or better than their traditional subscription-based counterparts, that are focused on increasing dissemination and experimenting with new business models. More appear every month. See the directory of open access journals.