Library Blog: General

Paying for Open Access at LSBU

Did you know that LSBU can pay for your Article Processing Charge (APC)? An APC is the publisher’s fee for covering the publishing costs related to editorial and peer-reviewing processes. It is usually associated with Gold Open Access, meaning that your research will be made available to read, for free, immediately. The amount these can cost range from nothing to £5,000, but the average cost of an APC is around £1,500. It is usually paid by a funder or institution, rather than the author.

Open Access Fund

Your funder may provide support for APCs, but if not, LSBU has an Open Access Fund designated to pay APCs for authors who fulfil our requirements. Any researcher can apply for their APC to be paid by this fund, whatever your discipline. We welcome applications from academics and research students, from any School. 

Requesting payment

You’ll need to submit a request through the form on OurLSBU (https://our.lsbu.ac.uk/typeform/academic-life/article-processing-charges-apcs). Do this before you make any agreement to pay the publisher, so that we can make the appropriate checks. Requests will be approved based on the criteria below until the fund is exhausted, and any that are submitted to us retrospectively won’t be approved.

Requirements

• The charge must be mandatory, and not an optional one 
• The Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY) must be applied, and no other
• The maximum cost of the APC is £5,000
• Only APCs are funded – not submission fees, page or colour charges, conference fees etc.
• Research must be original, and not reported elsewhere
• The corresponding author must be at LSBU
• The journal/publisher must meet minimum quality threshold

Checking your eligibility

In order that your research can be fully Open Access, we ask that the licence attributed to your work is CC-BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). We won’t be able to pay your APC if it is not, so you’ll need to check with the publisher if you’re not sure.

Make sure the journal or publisher you’re submitting to is legitimate. You can do this by visiting Think Check Submit (https://thinkchecksubmit.org/), where you can get advice on choosing the right journal for your research, and spotting predatory publishers.

Our Open Access Fund only covers pure Gold Open Access, and not hybrid (APCs in subscription journals). You can check whether your journal is fully Open Access by searching for it on the Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org/).

Apply now

Think you might fit the criteria for our Open Access Fund? Visit our APC page on OurLSBU (https://our.lsbu.ac.uk/typeform/academic-life/article-processing-charges-apcs) and fill in the form. If you have any questions, please email openaccess@lsbu.ac.uk.