Money for Open-Access Publishing

Open access is a hot topic in scholarly publishing. Fuelled by the new policies from funders, more and more chemists are looking to publish their research results in an open-access forum. Of course, there can be no doubt that high-quality publishing costs money, and as a consequence, the so called “gold road” or “author-pays” model has emerged where an Article Publication Charge (APC) is payable by the author. So, the question now arises on how authors can meet the associated cost.

Funding is available for authors, and partial or even full assistance in meeting the APC for open-access publishing can be classified largely based on the source of the money. This leads to four major categories where funding can come from: the funding agency, the institute, the society, and the publisher.

The editors of ChemistryOpen, a new society-owned fully open-access general chemistry journal from ChemPubSoc Europe, hope to answer some questions on open-access funding and provide authors with ideas for potential funding sources.