Article Processing Charges (APCs): What They Cost, Who Pays, and How to Get Them Waived

An article processing charge (APC) is the fee a journal charges to make one accepted article freely readable on publication, funding gold open access. Prices vary widely — typically $500 to $3,500 per article, averaging $1,600-$2,000 — and who pays depends on funder and institutional policy, increasingly through Read and Publish agreements rather than individual authors.

Which APC-payment route applies to you? A quick decision guide

The right route depends on who you are, where you are publishing, and what coverage your institution or funder already has in place. Check these in roughly this order, ideally before you submit to a journal, not after acceptance. If you haven’t settled on a venue yet, see CASRAI’s guide to choosing a journal for the broader selection framework — APC cost and coverage is one factor among several to weigh before submission.

Your situation	Likely route	What to verify first
Your institution has a Read and Publish / transformative agreement with the journal’s publisher	APC waived or bundled automatically under the agreement	The specific journal and publisher are on your library’s current agreement list, and you (not a co-author) are the corresponding author using your institutional affiliation/email
Your funder mandates open access and your grant has an active publication-cost line	Funder pays via the grant, direct or through a separate OA block grant	APCs are an allowable cost under this specific award, whether direct- or indirect-charged, and that the award’s period of performance still covers the expected publication date
No transformative agreement applies, and grant funds aren’t available or the award has closed	Institution’s central library-managed OA/APC fund	Fund eligibility rules — commonly “no other funding source,” a per-article cap, corresponding-author affiliation, and whether the fund has budget remaining this fiscal year
Corresponding author is based in a lower-income country under the publisher’s Research4Life-aligned tier	Automatic full or partial geographic waiver	The specific journal participates, and the waiver is requested at submission — not after acceptance
No institutional, funder, or geographic coverage applies, but paying is a genuine hardship	Publisher’s need-based fee-assistance program (for example, PLOS’s Publication Fee Assistance)	The specific publisher runs one, and its application deadline relative to submission
None of the above applies, or zero publishing cost is the priority	Diamond (no-fee) open access journal, or green self-archiving alongside a subscription-journal submission	Whether a suitable diamond-OA title exists in your field and meets any funder OA-mandate requirements

What counts as an APC

An APC is charged by the journal or publisher, tied to a specific accepted article, and paid in exchange for making that article open access — typically under a Creative Commons license — rather than restricting it behind a subscription paywall. A few boundary cases are worth being precise about:

• Not every open access journal charges an APC. A substantial share of OA journals, particularly outside North America and Western Europe, operate on no author-facing fee at all — funded instead by institutions, learned societies, or government subsidy. This no-fee model is formally distinct from gold OA and is generally referred to as diamond (or platinum) open access; see CASRAI’s Diamond open access entry.
• APCs are not the same as page charges or color charges. Traditional subscription journals have long charged authors per-page or per-figure production fees independent of access status; an APC specifically buys open access status for the article.
• A legitimate APC is not, by itself, evidence of a predatory publisher. The overwhelming majority of reputable open access journals — including those published by major societies and university presses — charge APCs and maintain genuine peer review. The red flag is a fee charged with little or no editorial scrutiny, not the existence of a fee. See CASRAI’s guide on identifying predatory journals and publishers for how to tell the difference.

What APCs typically cost

APC pricing is set independently by each journal and changes over time, so treat any specific figure as a snapshot rather than a fixed number — always check the publisher’s current price list before budgeting. As of 2026, the broad pattern looks like this:

• Typical range: most APCs at established publishers fall roughly between $500 and $3,500, with a commonly cited global average across journals in the region of $1,600–$2,000.
• Fully open access journals tend to charge less than hybrid journals — journals that are open access by default (PLOS, IEEE Access, most “born-OA” titles) generally sit lower than subscription journals that offer open access as a paid option article-by-article. Analyses of large-scale APC datasets have found the average hybrid-journal APC roughly twice that of full open access publishers.
• Flagship and high-impact titles sit well above the average. For example, PLOS ONE currently charges $2,477 for a standard research article (PLOS’s other, more selective journals range higher, up to roughly $6,460 depending on title and article type), and Nature’s gold open access option is priced at roughly £9,390 / $12,850 / €10,850 — among the highest APCs in the market. IEEE’s fully open access journals, by contrast, mostly charge a flat $2,160, with a 20% discount for members of the relevant IEEE society. Large multidisciplinary “megajournals” such as PLOS ONE sit in the middle of this spread rather than at either extreme, while many society-published journals price below the flagship commercial titles and, like IEEE, extend a further discount to members of the sponsoring society.
• Independent estimates of the underlying cost of publishing an article — typesetting, peer-review administration, hosting, archiving — put the true cost well below most APCs charged, commonly cited in the region of a few hundred to about €1,000, which is part of why APC pricing (rather than the existence of a fee at all) draws sustained scrutiny from libraries and funders.

Because pricing shifts year to year and even mid-year, don’t treat any number above as current without checking the publisher’s own APC page — Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley, and others publish (and periodically revise) per-journal APC lists directly.

Who actually pays the APC

“The author pays” is the historical shorthand, but in practice the payer is very rarely the individual researcher’s own pocket. The fee is typically covered by one of, or some combination of:

• The research funder, either as an explicit open-access line item within the grant budget (common with funders that mandate OA, such as those aligned with cOAlition S / Plan S) or through a dedicated OA fund the funder administers separately from individual grants.
• The author’s institution, via a library-managed open access fund, a block grant from the funder passed through the institution, or — increasingly — a Read and Publish agreement the institution has already negotiated (see below), in which case the individual author doesn’t submit a payment request at all.
• The author directly, out of departmental funds or, less commonly, personal funds — now the least common route at well-resourced institutions in funder-mandate jurisdictions, but still the default for researchers without institutional or funder OA support, particularly outside those jurisdictions.

See CASRAI’s dictionary entries for APC reimbursement (funder) and open access publication cost (grant-eligible) for how this is tracked as a distinct cost category in grant and CRIS systems. Who ends up covering the fee also depends heavily on career stage — see CASRAI’s guide on whether junior researchers should pay their own APC for a career-stage-specific breakdown.

Budgeting APCs as an allowable grant cost

For research administrators and PIs, the practical question isn’t just who pays in principle but whether a specific award will actually reimburse the fee, and how. A few points are worth checking before assuming an APC is covered:

• Confirm APCs are an allowable cost under the specific award. Many funders that mandate open access — including funders aligned with cOAlition S / Plan S, and agencies such as NIH, the Tri-Agencies, and Wellcome — explicitly permit APCs as a direct grant expense, but the exact rules, caps, and eligible journal types vary by funder and sometimes by grant mechanism. CASRAI has dedicated guides covering current requirements for NIH’s open access publishing fee limits, the Tri-Agency open access policy, and the Wellcome Trust open access policy — check the funder-specific terms directly rather than assuming a general rule applies.
• Check whether the cost must be direct-charged or is treated as facilities-and-administrative (indirect) cost. Policy varies by funder and, in some jurisdictions, by national research-costing framework; the award terms and the institution’s sponsored-programs or research-office guidance are the authoritative source, not a general assumption carried over from a different funder.
• Watch the timing. A common and costly mistake is paying (or committing to pay) an APC after the award’s period of performance has ended, when the funder will often no longer reimburse it — publication timelines frequently run behind a grant’s formal end date, so this is worth planning for well before project closeout, including via a no-cost extension where the funder allows one.
• Check for an institutional or funder-level cap. Some funders set a maximum reimbursable APC amount rather than covering whatever a journal charges, which matters especially for higher-priced flagship titles.

How institutions actually administer central APC/OA funds

Separately from grant budgets, many universities and research institutions run their own library-managed open access fund to cover APCs when no grant or transformative agreement applies. These funds are real, limited money, and the eligibility rules — while they vary by institution — follow a fairly consistent pattern worth checking before assuming coverage:

• “No other funding source” is nearly universal. Central OA funds are typically a payer of last resort: if the underlying research was grant-funded and the grant could cover the APC, or a transformative agreement already applies, the central fund is normally not the eligible route.
• Per-article caps are the norm, not the exception. Funds commonly cap what they will pay per article rather than covering whatever a journal charges — caps and formulas differ by institution and change over time, so check your own library’s current policy page rather than assuming a figure from elsewhere still applies.
• Corresponding-author affiliation is usually required. A co-author at the institution typically does not qualify if the corresponding author is affiliated elsewhere.
• Funds are frequently first-come, first-served within a fiscal year and can be exhausted before the year ends — a separate risk from the funder-side period-of-performance timing issue described above.
• Some transformative agreements layer institutional and individual coverage together rather than covering 100% of every APC outright — for instance, an agreement might have the institution cover a base amount automatically and apply a discount to any remainder, with fuller coverage where the author has no grant funds at all. The exact split is negotiated per agreement and per publisher, so it has to be checked for the specific deal rather than assumed from a general pattern.

The point almost every author misses: check coverage before submitting the manuscript, not after acceptance. Transformative agreements, central OA funds, and geographic waivers are all tied to a specific publisher and, often, a specific journal — by the time an article is accepted, the venue choice that determines eligibility has already been made. Research administrators can materially reduce APC surprises by building a coverage check into the pre-submission workflow: confirm with the library (for transformative agreements and central funds) and the sponsored-programs office (for grant allowability) which journals are covered before the manuscript goes out, not when the acceptance email — and the invoice — arrives.

APC waivers and discount programs

Every major publisher operating APC-funded open access journals maintains some form of waiver or discount policy, aimed principally at researchers based in lower-income countries and at authors who can show individual financial need. Two mechanisms are common:

• Geographic waivers tied to Research4Life. Research4Life — the partnership of UN agencies, publishers, and academic institutions that provides low-cost access to scholarly content in lower-income countries — also maintains a widely adopted country-eligibility framework that publishers use for APC relief. In the typical implementation, corresponding authors based in the lowest-income country tier receive a full (100%) APC waiver, and authors in the next tier receive a substantial (commonly 50%) discount; Elsevier, Wiley, Oxford University Press, and other large publishers each publish their own version of this policy, applied automatically based on the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation.
• Need-based fee assistance programs, independent of geography — for example, PLOS’s Publication Fee Assistance program considers individual requests where a lack of institutional or funder support would otherwise be a barrier to publishing, and PLOS states explicitly that “lack of funds should not be a barrier to open access publication.”

Waiver eligibility, the exact discount tier, and which journals participate all vary by publisher — always check the specific journal’s own waiver policy before assuming a discount applies, rather than relying on a general country-eligibility list alone. For a closer look at how these tiers actually work in practice across major publishers, see CASRAI’s guide to APC waiver eligibility by publisher and region.

Read and Publish / transformative agreements

A growing share of APC spend never reaches an individual author’s fee-payment request at all, because it has already been negotiated centrally between an institution (or a consortium of institutions) and a publisher. These deals go by several names — transformative agreements, Read and Publish agreements, or “publish and read” agreements — and the underlying idea is consistent: an institution’s historical subscription spend is repurposed into a single negotiated payment that covers both reading access to the publisher’s subscription content and open access publishing (with the APC waived or bundled) for the institution’s own corresponding authors.

The ESAC Initiative — a library-led effort tracking this specific agreement type — maintains a public registry that has recorded more than 1,500 such agreements across over 70 countries since 2019. Under a live agreement, an eligible corresponding author typically publishes open access in a participating journal without submitting any separate APC payment; the library or consortium has already settled the cost as part of the negotiated deal. See CASRAI’s dictionary entries for Transformative agreement (TA) and Read-and-Publish agreement for the precise operational distinctions between the terms, which are often used loosely and interchangeably in practice.

For researchers, the practical takeaway is to check with the institutional library before assuming an APC payment is needed at all — a relevant transformative agreement may already cover it, and paying separately (or asking a funder to) can mean paying twice for the same publication. CASRAI’s guide on how Read & Publish agreements work for authors covers the author-facing mechanics in more detail, and the Journal Checker Tool guide explains how to verify funder-compliance eligibility for a specific journal before submitting.

How APCs relate to the open access models

An APC is a funding mechanism, not an OA model in itself — the same fee structure appears, with different implications, across more than one model:

• Gold open access — the article is open on the publisher’s own platform immediately on publication, most commonly (though not exclusively) funded by an APC.
• Hybrid journals — a subscription journal that also offers open access on a per-article, APC-paid basis; hybrid APCs, as noted above, tend to run higher than fully open access titles.
• Diamond open access — open access with no APC charged to the author at all, funded instead by institutions, societies, or public subsidy.
• Green open access — the author self-archives a version of the article in a repository, typically without any APC, alongside (not instead of) the version of record published under whatever access model the journal itself uses.

These models are not mutually exclusive labels for a journal — a single hybrid journal, for instance, produces some articles under green self-archiving and others under a paid gold/hybrid APC route depending on individual author and funder choices. For a full side-by-side comparison of how gold, green, diamond, and hybrid OA differ in cost, licensing, and where the version of record lives, see CASRAI’s open access models comparison.

Hybrid journals and the “double-dipping” critique

Hybrid journals — subscription titles that also sell open access on a per-article basis — draw a specific and long-standing criticism: a library may already be paying a subscription for the journal, while an author (or that same institution’s funder) separately pays an APC to make one article within it open access. Critics call this “double-dipping” — the publisher is paid twice, by two different budgets at the same institution, for access to the same body of content. It’s a central reason libraries and funders scrutinize uncapped hybrid-APC spending more closely than fully open access publishing, and part of why hybrid APCs, as noted above, tend to run higher than APCs at fully open access titles. See CASRAI’s guide to hybrid open access journals for a fuller explanation of how the model works and how publishers have responded to the criticism.

Read and Publish agreements are, in part, a structural response to this problem: by bundling an institution’s subscription payment and its authors’ open access publishing into a single negotiated deal, the same institution isn’t billed separately for the same journal’s content twice.

The equity critique of author-pays open access

Shifting the cost of publishing from readers (via subscriptions) to authors (via APCs) solves the reader-access problem but introduces a different one: an author-pays model can make publishing harder to afford for exactly the researchers least likely to have institutional or funder support — independent scholars, authors at under-resourced institutions, early-career researchers between grants, and researchers outside the funder-mandate jurisdictions where OA budgets are most established. Waiver and discount programs (above) exist specifically to address this, but critics note that awareness, discoverability, and take-up of waiver programs are uneven, so formal eligibility doesn’t automatically translate into equal practical access. This is one reason the open access movement continues to invest in no-fee alternatives: diamond (or platinum) open access, funded by institutions, societies, or public subsidy rather than author fees, and green self-archiving, which carries no APC at all. International initiatives such as the Diamond Open Access community have continued to push for scaling this model as a structural alternative to author-pays publishing rather than relying solely on waivers to patch the affordability gap in the APC model.

Frequently asked questions

Do all open access journals charge an APC?

No. Diamond (or platinum) open access journals publish open access with no author-facing fee at all, funded instead by institutions, societies, or public subsidy. APCs are specifically a feature of the gold and hybrid OA models, not open access generally.

Who is responsible for arranging APC payment — the author, or someone else?

In practice it’s rarely the individual author’s own funds. Funders with OA mandates typically budget for APCs directly in the grant, institutions often run a library-managed OA fund, and a growing share of APCs are covered automatically through a Read and Publish agreement the institution has already negotiated — check with the institutional library before assuming a personal or departmental payment is required.

Does a high APC mean a journal is more prestigious, or more rigorous?

Not reliably. APC level is set by the publisher’s own pricing strategy and reflects brand and market position as much as production cost — independent estimates of the actual cost of publishing an article sit well below what many high-APC journals charge. A low or waived APC is likewise not evidence of weak peer review; diamond OA journals in particular charge nothing and can be rigorously reviewed. Fee level and editorial quality should be evaluated separately.

Can I get an APC waiver or discount?

Possibly. Most major publishers offer automatic geographic waivers or discounts for corresponding authors based in lower-income countries (commonly aligned with Research4Life’s country tiers), and some also run need-based fee-assistance programs independent of geography. Eligibility and the exact discount vary by publisher and journal, so check the specific journal’s waiver policy directly rather than assuming a general rule applies.

If my institution has a transformative agreement, do I still need to request APC funding from my grant?

Usually not, for articles published in a participating journal with the institution as the corresponding author’s affiliation — the agreement typically covers the APC as part of the negotiated deal. Confirm with the institutional library which publishers and journals are covered before submitting a separate funder request, to avoid paying for the same publication twice.

Can I still charge an APC to a grant after the award has ended?

Often not, or only within specific limits — many funders will only reimburse costs incurred within the award’s formal period of performance, and publication frequently lags behind a project’s end date. Check the specific award terms well before closeout, and ask about a no-cost extension or a funder-specific post-award publication allowance if the article is still in the pipeline when the grant ends.

Is a hybrid journal APC “double-dipping” if my institution already subscribes?

It can be, in the sense critics mean the term — the publisher is paid once through the institution’s subscription and again through the individual APC, for content within the same journal. Read and Publish agreements exist partly to eliminate this by bundling both payments into a single negotiated deal with the publisher.