What is an APC and what are authors paying for?

As costs are involved in every stage of the publication process, from administrating peer review to copy-editing and hosting the final article on dedicated servers, authors are asked to pay an article processing charge (APC) in order for their article to be published open access under a Creative Commons licence.

The article processing charge(APC) is 420$ 

APC waivers for financial need

ARSJ  offers APC waivers and discounts for papers published in our fully open access journals whose corresponding authors are based in the world’s lowest income countries as defined by the World Bank. See here for further information.

Requests from other authors for APC waivers and discounts will be considered on a case-by-case basis, and may be granted in cases of financial need.  All applications for discretionary APC waivers should be made prior to or at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance are unable to be considered. 

To request a waiver:

• ARSJ . Please start your submission and request a waiver as part of the submission process. Contact us if you have any questions.
• ARSJ OA journal. Please contact us at the point of submission stating the journal to which you wish to make an application

We are unable to grant requests to waive APCs just on the basis of the research topic explored  (for example COVID-19 or SARS) where there is no evidence of a financial need. If, however, you are in financial need and unable to support the costs of the APC, we would be happy to assess your eligibility for a waiver or discount under our standard policies for fully OA journals, described above.

APC waivers are not offered for open access publication in hybrid titles, as authors without the funds to publish open access in these journals can publish via the subscription route.

In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently making all content related to COVID-19 immediately freely accessible and discoverable via our dedicated COVID-19 landing page and via the PubMed Central COVID-19 initiative. This applies regardless of whether authors have opted for the subscription or gold OA publication routes.

APC waivers for substantial critiques of articles published in OA journals

Where authors are submitting a manuscript that represents a substantial critique of an article previously published in the same fully open access journal, they may apply for a waiver of the article processing charge (APC).

In order to apply for an APC waiver on these grounds, please contact the journal editorial team at the point of submission. Requests will not be considered until a manuscript has been submitted, and will be awarded at the discretion of the editor. 

APC waivers and refunds for publisher errors

ARSJ will refund an article processing charge (APC) if an error on our part has resulted in a failure to publish an article under the open access terms selected by the authors. This may include the failure to make an article openly available on the journal platform, or publication of an article under a different Creative Commons licence from that selected by the author(s). A refund will only be offered if these errors have not been corrected within 30 days of publication.

If you become aware of an error in the open access status or licensing of your article, please contact the central Open Research customer support team immediately at this email address.

APCs will not be refunded when articles are retracted as a result of author error or misconduct.

Institutional licence price adjustments for hybrid journals

We annually review our journal lists to ensure our pricing remains fair, transparent, and consistent across our whole journal portfolio. Open access articles are assessed separately from subscription articles and a subscription price only reflects access to subscription articles