Article Processing Charge (APC): Definition

Ask about Article processing charge

Answers are drawn from this dictionary entry and the rest of the CASRAI corpus, with a link to every source.

Answers are AI-generated from CASRAI’s own published pages and can be wrong, so check the linked sources before relying on one; your question is logged without personal data — never sold, never used to train a third-party model — to show us what CASRAI is missing, so please do not type personal or confidential details. How we use this

Fee paid to journals to publish an article as open access (OA). They are most often paid by the author’s institutions or research funder. The article processing charge (APC) covers the publisher’s processing and publishing costs for the OA article and to generate income. An APC is an alternative method of covering costs and income generation to the traditional subscription model of payment to access or receive journal content. Not all OA or hybrid journals charge an APC for OA publication: some use other models to cover costs such as sponsorship. In reputable journals APCs differ from vanity publishing because of robust quality control such as peer review that precedes publication.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Article processing charge"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/article-processing-charge" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/article-processing-charge",
  "name": "Article processing charge",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/article-processing-charge",
  "description": "Fee paid to journals to publish an article as open access.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/knowledge-equity#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/article-processing-charge",
  "sameAs": [
    "APC",
    "Article Processing Fee",
    "Publication charge"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-19T19:09:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}