Some publishers offer special agreements that lower the open access publishing fee for authors. This is typically done through institutional memberships or transformative agreements (TA). These agreements use a fixed annual fee or portion of the journal subscription fees, often based on the size of faculty or expected number of submitted articles, to cover all or a percentage of article-processing fees for the institution for a set period of time.
OU Libraries is a member in BioMed Central, which means OU authors get a 15% discount off author publication fees.
If you submit your manuscript from an IP address that has been registered by your institution, the membership discount will be automatically applied.
If you submit your manuscript using a non-registered IP address:
1) Please choose the option “I believe that I am covered by an institutional membership arrangement” on the APC agreement page
2) Select your institution from the drop-down list
3) BioMed Central Customer Service team will then handle your discount request before sending instructions on how to complete your submission.
OU faculty can publish open access in Cambridge University Press journals without paying an article processing fee (APC). This includes their 44 - Gold OA journals and 330 - hybrid journals. OU authors must be the corresponding author for the article for the APC to be waived under this agreement.
The process for submitting an article is the same as non-OA. After your manuscript has undergone peer-review and has been accepted, you will have the option to select open access and assign an appropriate Creative Commons License. Authors must create an account in their payment system, once you have selected your institution the invoice will indicate a zero balance.
IOP (Institute of Physics) journals
All corresponding authors who are current staff members, researchers (permanent, temporary and/or visiting), or students at OU at the time of submission, can publish open access at no cost to themselves. *The corresponding author is the author who submits the manuscript and is responsible for communicating with the journal during the submission, peer review and publication process.
• Articles accepted beginning January 1, 2023, will be eligible for transformative agreement funding to enable authors to publish open access with no cost to themselves
• Research paper, special issue, letter and review article types
• Included journals are dependent on your eligible institution; please see the below list for details. Check the full title list of eligible journals.
ACS (American Chemical Society) journals
Starting in Jan 2024, all OU authors can now publish without paying an article processing fee in ACS journals, and our access to content has been extended to all ACS web edition publications. Manuscripts are automatically approved. There are no special steps to take when you submit.
See ACS's website about the agreement for more information.
