An APC waiver is a full or partial cancellation of the article processing charge that fully open-access journals normally require, granted to corresponding authors based on their institution’s country income classification, financial hardship, or funder agreement. Under Plan S, cOAlition S funders require publishers to offer automatic waivers for authors in low-income countries and discounts for those in lower-middle-income countries, closing one of the most cited equity gaps in gold open access.
An APC waiver is best understood as a scheme, not a single policy: each publisher sets its own eligibility list, discount tier, and application process. This guide compares the schemes run by Wiley, Elsevier, Springer Nature, SAGE, PLOS, Frontiers and IEEE Access, explains how they interact with Plan S’s equity commitments, and sets out the Global South critique of APC-funded gold open access that waivers only partly answer.
- What Is an APC Waiver Under Plan S?
- How Do APC Waiver Schemes Compare Across Major Publishers?
- How Do You Apply for an APC Waiver?
- Do APC Waivers Resolve the Global South Critique of Gold OA?
- Common Questions About APC Waivers
What Is an APC Waiver Under Plan S?
An article processing charge (APC) is the fee a fully open-access journal charges to make a manuscript freely available on publication, typically covering peer-review administration, copyediting, typesetting and hosting. An APC waiver removes or reduces that fee, usually by 50% or 100%, so an author’s ability to pay does not determine whether their research is published open access.
Plan S, the funder-driven open-access mandate coordinated by cOAlition S, makes waiver provision an explicit publisher obligation rather than a discretionary courtesy. cOAlition S’s implementation guidance requires publishers hosting Plan S-compliant journals or platforms to offer automatic APC waivers for authors from low-income countries and discounts for authors from lower-middle-income countries, aligned to World Bank income classifications. This sits alongside cOAlition S’s Price and Service Transparency Framework, which requires publishers to disclose what an APC funds — a precondition for judging whether a waiver genuinely offsets cost rather than masks an inflated headline price.
How Do APC Waiver Schemes Compare Across Major Publishers?
Most large publishers anchor eligibility to two reference points — World Bank income classifications and Research4Life country groupings (Group A: low-income; Group B: lower-middle-income) — but discount tiers, journal scope, and exclusions vary considerably.
| Publisher | Waiver mechanism | Typical discount tiers | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wiley | Research4Life-aligned, automatic | 100% (Group A), 50% (Group B) | Fully open-access journals only |
| Elsevier | Geographic Pricing for Open Access (GPOA) pilot | Full waiver where all authors are in low-income countries; scaled by GNI per capita | 142 gold OA journals in the pilot |
| Springer Nature | World Bank income classification, requested at submission | 100% (low-income), 50% (lower-middle-income, GDP under $200bn) | Fully OA journals; excludes hybrid/transformative titles |
| SAGE | Country-tier list, requested at submission | Full and partial waivers by income tier | SAGE’s open-access journal portfolio |
| PLOS | Global Participation Initiative (GPI) | Tiered flat fee by national income group, replacing case-by-case requests | All PLOS journals |
| Frontiers | Fee Support Programme | Full and partial support reviewed against income and hardship criteria | Frontiers’ journal portfolio |
| IEEE Access | Discretionary, confirmed with editorial office | No published country-tier schedule comparable to the above | IEEE Access only |
Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature
These three run the most heavily documented schemes. Wiley applies its waiver automatically through a Research4Life-based eligibility check at submission: Group A countries receive a full APC waiver on fully open-access journals, Group B authors a 50% discount. Wiley has reported that in 2022 this programme supported 1,850 open-access articles from low- and middle-income countries, representing around $4.6 million in waived fees.
Elsevier moved beyond a flat waiver/no-waiver split in January 2024 with its Geographic Pricing for Open Access (GPOA) pilot, covering 142 gold OA journals. It scales the APC to a country’s Gross National Income per capita rather than a single discount step, and grants a full waiver where every author on a paper is in a World Bank-classified low-income country.
Springer Nature waives the APC in full for corresponding authors in World Bank low-income economies (classification dated July 2023) and offers a 50% discount for lower-middle-income economies with 2022 GDP below $200 billion. Ukraine’s discount was temporarily raised to 100% following the Russian invasion. Waivers must be requested at submission, do not apply to hybrid or transformative journals, and are superseded by Springer Nature’s separate country-tiered pricing pilot for a subset of titles.
SAGE, PLOS, Frontiers and IEEE Access
SAGE operates a country-tier waiver list across its open-access journals, requested at submission. PLOS replaced case-by-case waiver requests with its Global Participation Initiative, sorting authors’ countries into income-based groups with a flat, discounted per-tier fee rather than a binary full-price-or-waived split — reducing the stigma and friction of individual applications. Frontiers runs a Fee Support Programme assessed against national income and hardship. IEEE Access is the narrowest case: every article carries an APC, and IEEE publishes no country-tier waiver schedule comparable to Wiley, Elsevier or Springer Nature — any fee reduction must be confirmed directly with the editorial office, a documented friction point for under-resourced authors.
How Do You Apply for an APC Waiver?
Application mechanics differ by publisher, but the workflow is consistent enough to plan around:
- Confirm the corresponding author’s country against the publisher’s current income-tier list — lists move periodically against World Bank data.
- Check the target journal is fully open access; most schemes exclude hybrid and transformative journals.
- Request the waiver at the point of submission, not after acceptance — several publishers treat this as a hard requirement.
- Where a scheme is discretionary (hardship review, or IEEE Access-style editorial confirmation), prepare a short justification and expect manual review.
- Keep the waiver confirmation on file, since funders increasingly audit open-access spend and waiver use together.
Do APC Waivers Resolve the Global South Critique of Gold OA?
Waiver schemes address the most visible barrier — an author who cannot pay is not automatically excluded — but they do not resolve the structural critique of APC-based gold open access. UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on Open Science, adopted by its General Conference, explicitly cautions that APC-funded models risk reproducing global inequalities in research communication rather than removing them, since publishing capacity remains gated by a fee mechanism even when that fee is occasionally waived.
Three gaps persist. Country-tier eligibility is coarse-grained, so researchers in middle-income countries with limited institutional funding can fall outside any discount band. Waiver schemes typically exclude hybrid and transformative journals, which still hold prestige in many disciplines, leaving authors to weigh a subscription route against a discounted fully-OA option. And discretionary schemes — the IEEE Access pattern — impose administrative burden that automatic Research4Life-tier schemes avoid, so policy generosity on paper does not always translate into equal ease of access.
For research administrators, the implication is that eligibility should be checked publisher-by-publisher and journal-by-journal, not assumed from a general “this publisher supports LMIC authors” reputation — an automatic tier-based waiver and a discretionary editorial request can produce very different outcomes for the same author. Tracking waiver terms alongside funder mandates is increasingly part of the compliance workload that research administration teams manage across the publication lifecycle.
Common Questions About APC Waivers
What is an APC waiver?
An APC waiver is a full or partial cancellation of an article processing charge, granted to authors — most often based in low- or middle-income countries — so that inability to pay does not prevent open-access publication. Publishers set their own eligibility criteria, usually tied to World Bank income classifications or Research4Life country groupings; related open-access terminology is catalogued in CASRAI’s research-administration dictionary.
How do you apply for an APC waiver?
Authors request a waiver or discount at the point of manuscript submission, before acceptance, by declaring the corresponding author’s institutional country. Automatic schemes (Wiley, Springer Nature, Elsevier’s GPOA pilot) apply the discount via a system check; discretionary schemes require a written justification reviewed by the editorial office.
How much does an APC typically cost?
Article processing charges in fully open-access journals commonly range from roughly $500 to $6,000, with a 2022 study of DOAJ-indexed titles finding an average APC near $1,997 among journals that charge a fee. Costs vary by publisher prestige, discipline and journal impact factor.
How can authors avoid article processing charges entirely?
Beyond waivers, authors can publish in diamond open-access journals that charge no APC to author or reader, use institutional funds or transformative agreements that bundle subscription and OA costs, or submit to hybrid journals under a subscription route without paying an OA fee.
As Plan S’s Price and Service Transparency Framework matures and more publishers pilot income-scaled pricing over binary waivers, eligibility criteria will keep shifting — institutions should track each publisher’s current tier list rather than rely on a summary that may already be out of date.
