Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A research grant includes 12,000 GBP for projected APCs across four expected articles.
- Is an instance
A Wellcome grant draws on the institutional block grant for an OA APC at acceptance.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Book purchases for the library are not OA publication costs.
- Not an instance
Conference registration fees are travel costs, not OA publication costs.
Editorial commentary
This term answers an eligibility question: which open-access publication costs — principally article processing charges (APCs), but also cases such as data-publication or repository-deposit fees — a funder will let a grant budget actually pay for, and under what conditions or caps. It does not describe the mechanics of how an eligible cost gets paid; that’s the separate, closely related question covered at APC reimbursement (funder).
The general pattern among major funders
Most major research funders — UKRI, Wellcome, NIH, the European Research Council/Horizon Europe — now permit or require open-access publication of grant-funded outputs and treat OA costs as grant-eligible, generally within a cap. Horizon Europe requires Plan S compliance, including its restriction on paying fees for hybrid-journal OA once the applicable transition period has ended. NIH treats OA-related costs as allowable and separately operates the NIH Public Access policy, which requires deposit of the accepted manuscript at acceptance regardless of whether an APC is paid.
Funders are not converging on one answer
Eligibility rules are actively diverging, not standardizing. The Gates Foundation’s 2025 policy revision removed APC funding support entirely, instead directing authors toward no-fee green open-access routes and specific no-fee publishing arrangements it negotiates directly with publishers. This is a genuinely different posture from UKRI and Wellcome, which continue to fund APCs through institutional block grants. A grants office cannot assume one funder’s eligibility rule for OA costs applies to another award in the same budget.
In practice
Check the specific funder’s current open-access policy for the award in hand before assuming an OA cost is eligible — caps, journal-type restrictions (e.g., no hybrid-journal fees), and required licensing terms (typically CC BY) vary by funder and change relatively often.
References
- UKRI Open Access Policy; Plan S Implementation Guidance (cOAlition S); NIH Public Access Policy.
Also known as
Grant-funded APC · OA publication budget · Publication cost (grant)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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