Submit Your Work 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 thousands of open access peer-reviewed or editorial quality-controlled 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 directory of open access journals.) 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.
Options
- eScholarship publishes a number of journals that are edited by UC faculty or sponsored by UC departments, research units, or publishing programs. Learn more about using eScholarship’s publishing services for UC-affiliated journals.
- UC gets discounts on some publication fees via institutional memberships or licensing agreements. See the chart, below, or contact your campus library Scholarly Communication Officer to find out about local options.
UC Discounts on Article Publication Charges for Open Access Journals - 2012 (updated Feb. 23, 2012)
| Publisher or Publication | Journals Included | Open Access Discount | Discount Based On |
Qualifies | Notes |
| American Chemical Society | CDL-licensed journals | 33% Non-ACS Member; 67% ACS Member |
Level of discount dependent on ACS Membership | All UC | |
| BioMed Central | Most | 15%; Reviewers are eligible for 20% discount |
BMC Supporter Membership | All UC | |
| Mary Ann Liebert | CDL-licensed journals | 33% | Institutional Members | UCD, UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD, UCSF, UCSB | $3,000 for initial article, discount applies to subsequent published articles |
| National Academy of Sciences | PNAS | 25% | UC Site License | All UC | |
| Nature Publishing | British Journal of Cancer | Approx. 25% | UC Site License | All UC | |
| Oxford Univ. Press | Nucleic Acids Research | 50% | NAR Membership | All UC | |
| Oxford Univ. Press | Journal of Experimental Botany | 100% | Current Institutional Subscription | All UC | All primary papers whose corresponding authors' institutions have a current subscription to the JXB are published Open Access |
| Public Library of Science | All | 10% | Membership | All UC | |
| Springer | SpringerOpen Journals | 15% | Institutional Membership | All UC | Note that this is not the UC-Springer Open Access Pilot, which ran from Jan. 2009 to March 2011. |
- See a description of various publishing alternatives and a table of the characteristics of scholarly publishing options.
- Consult the Directory of Open Access Journals for a list of thousands of quality controlled scientific and scholarly open access journals, many with citation rates and impact factors equivalent or better than their traditional subscription-based counterparts. More appear every month.