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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
