Free Open Access Publishing Opportunities for Azusa Pacific University Authors

Globally, transformative agreements are being piloted as a way for the research community, academic libraries, and scholarly publishers to work together to find a financially viable path to transition to an open-access publishing model. Azusa Pacific University Library is actively seeking inroads to convert Read Only (paywalled subscriptions) agreements to transformative agreements, thereby furthering aligning to open-access, while increasing the reach and impact of research.

Transformative agreements are contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries or consortia) and publishers that gradually transition the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing. These agreements shift funding away from paying to read closed articles toward paying a fair price for open-access publishing services. (SCELC, 2022)

From 2022, the library is offering a number of Read + Publish agreements that will enable authors to publish their articles in selected hybrid & open-access journals, including:

• Wiley
• Cambridge
• American Chemical Society
• Springer
• Elsevier

Under these agreements, the library subscribes to a journal/article package from a publisher and pays an increment above the base subscription fee in order to allow our researchers to publish articles in Gold Open Access and/or in Hybrid Open Access journals without having to pay Article Processing Charges or to receive a heavy discount on the APC.

If you wish to publish Open-Access in a journal not covered by an active APU OA Read & Publish agreement:

1. Contact your department chair or dean to see if there are department funds available to support OA publishing.
2. Identity outside funding sources - try this list of research funders and institutions worldwide that cover open access article processing charges (APCs).
3. Contact the University Research Office to see if there is Grant funding available.
4. When applying for grants, write APCs into the grant budget.

If you have any questions, please email ask@apu.libanswers.com. 

Creative Commons (CC) licenses play an important role in facilitating Gold Open Access publishing. They provide a legal framework for giving users the ability to freely view, download and distribute content. NOTE: Each publisher will allow certain CC licenses so not all these apply to all publishers. 

We offer authors a choice of Creative Commons licenses that they can apply to their work, which differ in terms of the rights they grant end users. All of the licenses require that those redistributing or re-using the work should give appropriate credit and indicate if changes were made. Authors might be required or advised by their funders to choose particular CC licenses, such as CC-BY or CC-BY-ND, when publishing their research as Gold OA.

• CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution License): Allows others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. This is often the preferred choice for journal articles, particularly in science, technology and medicine, as it allows other researchers to make full use of the findings in their own work. It is also the license that is required for journal articles by some funders, including cOAlition S.

• CC-BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike License): Allows others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided it is distributed under the same license as the original original. This license is permitted by some funders as an alternative to CC-BY.

• CC-BY-ND (Creative Commons No-Derivatives License): Allows others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. However, if you remix, transform or build upon the material these modifications cannot be distributed. This license is permitted by some funders as an alternative to CC-BY.

• CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Non-Commercial License): Allows others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. However, the material may not be used for commercial purposes. It can be an appropriate license for monographs because it protects print copy sales while still providing scope for users to create derivative works of the online version to the benefit of all academia.

• CC-BY-NC-SA (Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike): Allows others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, remix, transform and build upon the material for any non-commercial purpose, but the material may not be used for any commercial purpose. If the material is remixed, transformed or built upon, it must be distributed under the same license as the original. While the Share-alike license might sometimes encourage further uptake of OA by authors wanting to re-use the content, it can also create an unnecessary barrier to the re-use of the OA content.

• CC-BY-NC-ND (Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives License): Allows others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. However, the material may not be used for commercial purposes and if you remix, transform or build upon the material these modifications cannot be distributed. The license is particularly appropriate for books and other products where significant revenue is needed from derivative rights sales (for example, translation rights), in order to keep author charges low.

• APC - An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee that is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal.
• Open access - Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers
• Embargo period - the embargo period for academic journals is a period of time set by the publisher where open access to the author’s accepted manuscript version of the article in a digital repository (e.g. UCs PURE Portal) is restricted until the embargo period expires. Typical embargo periods range from 6 to 24 months, though some publishers may require an embargo of up to 48 months
• Ringgold ID -The Ringgold Identifier is a unique numerical identifier, its purpose is to disambiguate organizations. It is used globally by many types of organizations, with over 600k organizations registered.
• Hybrid Journal - A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee (also called an article processing charge or APC) to the publisher in order to publish an article with open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.