CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: apc waiver

  • Read and Publish Agreements: Meeting Plan S

    A read and publish agreement is a single institutional contract that bundles a library’s journal-subscription payments with its authors’ open-access publishing fees, so researchers publish open access without paying an individual Article Processing Charge (APC). It is one of several mechanisms institutions use to satisfy funder open-access mandates such as Plan S, alongside publish-and-read deals, transformative journals, and APC waivers.

    A read and publish agreement is defined by having two payment components in one contract: a fee for reading (subscription access) and a fee for publishing (open-access output) from the same institution to the same publisher.

    What is a read and publish agreement?

    A read and publish (RAP) agreement is a contract between a library or consortium and a publisher that consolidates two previously separate payment streams — subscription access and per-article open-access fees — into one negotiated sum. Corresponding authors affiliated with the subscribing institution can then publish open access in the publisher’s eligible journals without submitting an individual APC invoice.

    RAP contracts emerged from the broader category of transformative agreements: deals designed to shift a publisher’s revenue away from subscription reading and towards open-access publishing over a defined term. The Scholarly Kitchen’s 2019 primer on transformative agreements, still the reference framework cited across library literature, formalised the RAP/PAR distinction that libraries and publishers use today.

    • Eligibility is normally restricted to the corresponding author at a subscribing institution.
    • Coverage typically spans a publisher’s hybrid and fully open-access journal portfolio, though scope varies by contract.
    • Most agreements carry an annual article quota or budget cap; once exhausted, further OA publishing may require a separate APC or wait until the next contract year.

    How the model satisfies Plan S without per-article APCs

    Plan S, the policy coordinated by the funder consortium cOAlition S, requires that research outputs from participating funders be made immediately open access, either in a fully OA journal or platform, or via a compliant route within a subscription journal. A read and publish agreement satisfies this by making every eligible article OA on publication as a contractual default, removing the author’s need to source separate APC funding.

    Because the institution has already paid for publishing rights as part of the bundled fee, the author’s compliance obligation is met automatically at acceptance, provided the article falls within the agreement’s scope and quota. This is the core mechanic that distinguishes RAP deals from a standard hybrid-journal APC waiver, which still requires a case-by-case funding decision.

    cOAlition S’s Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S treats transformative agreements as a transitional compliance route, not a permanent end state. Under that guidance, newly negotiated transformative contracts concluded from 2020 were capped at a maximum three-year term and required a defined scenario for full conversion to open access once the contract expired — meaning agreements negotiated in this window needed a stated end date for reliance on the subscription-plus-publishing model, generally landing around 2024.

    Read-and-publish vs publish-and-read vs transformative journals

    Institutions encounter several related mechanisms that all aim at Plan S compliance but differ in who pays, for what, and how the cost falls across a consortium.

    Mechanism Payment structure Who bears cost in a consortium Typical compliance route
    Read-and-publish (RAP) Reading fee + publishing fee, bundled All member libraries share read-access cost Transformative agreement
    Publish-and-read (PAR) Publishing fee only; reading included Cost falls mainly on institutions whose authors publish Transformative agreement
    Transformative journal Per-article APC, but journal commits to OA growth targets Individual author/funder pays per article Direct Plan S-compliant route (time-limited by cOAlition S)
    APC waiver No payment; fee reduced or removed case-by-case Publisher absorbs cost, often for LMIC authors Discretionary, publisher- or policy-specific

    The Scholarly Kitchen’s framework draws the RAP/PAR line precisely: a Read-and-Publish agreement charges the publisher for both reading and publishing in one contract, while a Publish-and-Read agreement charges only for publishing, with reading access included at no further cost. Germany’s DEAL consortium agreement with Wiley illustrates the PAR variant concretely: the negotiated Publish&Read fee for hybrid open-access articles was set at €2,750 per article, fixed for the three-year term of the contract, with legacy subscription payments folded into that single per-article rate.

    Transformative journals are a distinct, narrower mechanism: individual hybrid journals commit to year-on-year OA growth targets in exchange for continued Plan S eligibility, but authors (or their funders) still pay a per-article APC — the mechanism a general RAP deal is specifically designed to avoid.

    Cost-recovery mechanics for libraries

    Libraries typically negotiate RAP and PAR deals with a cost-neutrality target: the new bundled fee should approximate prior subscription spend, redirected rather than added to. In practice, outcomes vary. Some negotiated agreements land close to cost-neutral; others increase total spend once publishing volume is factored in, particularly where no article-volume cap or price ceiling is agreed.

    The ESAC Initiative (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges), coordinated by the Max Planck Digital Library, maintains a public registry of signed transformative agreements and a set of negotiation principles — cost transparency, author copyright retention (typically via a CC BY licence), and a defined transition pathway — that most library consortia now use as a negotiating baseline. In the UK, Jisc Collections’ Requirements for Transformative Open Access Agreements sets equivalent expectations for higher-education institutions negotiating on a national basis.

    Article Processing Charges outside a RAP contract remain the counterfactual libraries are trying to avoid. Analyses of Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)-listed gold OA titles have found APCs ranging from roughly $500 to $6,000, with an average close to $2,000 per article — a cost that scales directly with an institution’s publication volume when paid individually rather than bundled.

    • Cambridge University Press states its global transformative agreements let authors at over 1,000 institutions publish OA at no direct cost to the author.
    • UK consortium deals are negotiated centrally by Jisc; Australian and New Zealand deals are negotiated by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL).
    • Consortium-level PAR deals shift more of the cost burden onto institutions with higher publishing output, unlike RAP deals where read-access cost is shared more evenly.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is a read and publish agreement?

    A read and publish agreement is a contract in which a publisher receives a single bundled payment from a library or consortium covering both subscription reading access and open-access publishing fees for the institution’s corresponding authors. It replaces individual APC invoicing with one negotiated, institution-level cost.

    What is the meaning of “read and publish” versus “publish and read”?

    “Read and publish” means the publisher is paid separately for reading and publishing within one contract, whereas “publish and read” (PAR) means the publisher is paid only for publishing, with reading access supplied at no additional cost. The distinction affects how cost is apportioned across a library consortium.

    How much does the average APC cost?

    Gold open-access APCs typically range from around $500 to $6,000 per article, with studies of DOAJ-listed journals putting the average close to $2,000. A read and publish agreement absorbs this variable, per-article cost into one predictable annual institutional fee.

    Implications and outlook

    For research administrators, RAP and PAR agreements simplify Plan S compliance tracking: instead of monitoring individual APC waiver requests, the compliance question becomes whether a given journal and author fall within an already-signed contract’s scope and remaining quota. This shifts administrative effort from transaction-level approval to portfolio-level negotiation and monitoring.

    cOAlition S has consistently framed transformative agreements as transitional rather than terminal, with time-limited terms built into its Plan S guidance. Institutions relying on RAP or PAR deals should treat quota caps, contract renewal dates, and each publisher’s stated conversion pathway to full open access as the operational details that determine whether Plan S compliance holds for the full contract term — not an assumption that any signed agreement guarantees indefinite coverage.

    Research administrators evaluating a publisher’s OA agreement should check it against the institution’s affiliated research administration policy and confirm how corresponding-author eligibility is determined, since eligibility criteria are central to whether an individual article is actually covered — a determination closely tied to authorship and corresponding-author status on the submitted manuscript.

  • APC Waiver Guide: How 7 Major Publishers Compare

    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?

    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.

  • Gates Foundation Open Access Policy: No More APCs for cOAlition S Funders

    The Gates Foundation open access policy was refreshed for 2025, taking effect on 1 January 2025: the foundation stopped paying article processing charges (APCs) for individual manuscripts, added a mandatory preprint-deposit requirement, and expanded the policy’s scope to cover every funded manuscript and its underlying data.

    The Gates Foundation open access policy is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mandatory framework requiring that all peer-reviewed research and data arising from its funding be made freely available, openly licensed, and reusable without embargo. As a founding member of cOAlition S, the funder that co-created and popularised Plan S in 2018, the foundation’s 2025 refresh is being watched closely as a signal of where other research funders may be heading on APC costs.

    What Changed in the 2025 Policy Refresh?

    The 2025 policy is framed as a “refresh” of the 2021 policy, not a wholesale replacement — the core repository mandate survives intact. What changes is scope and support. It now applies to “all published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation” — termed Funded Manuscripts — and to “any data underlying the Funded Manuscripts,” a broader remit than the 2021 text.

    Three elements define the refresh:

    • Mandatory preprint deposit for every funded manuscript, in addition to the existing accepted-manuscript deposit requirement.
    • An earlier trigger for open data: data must now be accessible as soon as the preprint is available, not only once the accepted article is published.
    • Withdrawal of financial support for individual APC payments, shifting that cost onto grantees and co-authors.

    Why Did the Foundation Stop Paying APCs?

    The 2025 policy is unambiguous on this point: “The Foundation Will Not Pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Any publication fees are the responsibility of the grantees and their co-authors.” This is a change to support, not to what is mandated — grantees were never obliged to use the foundation’s APC funds under the 2021 policy, but many did, particularly for publishing in fully open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

    The foundation frames this as part of a wider push against the gold-OA/APC model, which critics argue rewards well-resourced authors while pricing out others. Rather than underwriting per-article fees, it says it will back non-APC routes to open publishing, including its own Gates Open Research platform and select publisher partnerships covering Gates-funded authors outside the standard APC mechanism.

    The practical effect falls unevenly. Per an analysis by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe in The Scholarly Kitchen (15 April 2024), Gates grantees publish roughly 4,000 papers a year — about 0.07% of articles published globally — so the aggregate revenue impact on any single open-access publisher is likely modest, even though the effect on individual grantees lacking alternative funding can be significant.

    What Does the New Preprint-First Mandate Require?

    Every Funded Manuscript must now be “published as a preprint in a preprint server recognized by the foundation” that applies sufficient scrutiny, carrying a CC BY 4.0 licence or equivalent. This sits alongside — not instead of — the existing requirement that the accepted manuscript be deposited “immediately upon publication in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository, with proper metadata tagging identifying Gates funding.”

    Two details matter for compliance teams:

    • Grantees can self-exempt from the preprint requirement where they determine “a preprint is not appropriate due to ethical, safety or other legitimate concerns” — the foundation has not yet published criteria for what counts.
    • The foundation is not mandating a single preprint server. It has said it will point grantees to ASAPbio’s preprint server directory rather than maintain its own list, though it separately partnered with Taylor & Francis/F1000 to launch VeriXiv, a verified preprint platform grantees may optionally use.

    Copyright-retention language is essentially unchanged: grantees must retain enough copyright to deposit and licence the manuscript CC BY 4.0, and include a foundation-mandated acknowledgement and rights-retention statement.

    How Does Gates Compare With Other cOAlition S Funders?

    The Gates Foundation is not the only cOAlition S member re-examining its terms, but it is the first founding funder to formally withdraw central APC funding. Wellcome Trust and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the two other funders most closely associated with Plan S’s origins, still fund publication fees through institutional block-grant mechanisms rather than the pay-per-article support the Gates Foundation has now dropped.

    Funder Current policy effective date Pays APCs? Preprint requirement
    Gates Foundation 1 January 2025 (refresh) No — discontinued for individual manuscripts Mandatory, narrow ethical/safety exemption
    Wellcome Trust 1 January 2021 Yes — via institutional block grants Encouraged, not mandated
    UKRI 1 April 2022 (journal articles); 1 January 2024 (monographs) Yes — via block grant to research organisations Not mandated
    cOAlition S / Plan S baseline Founding principles from 2018 Funder-dependent; no central APC cap post-2024 Not centrally mandated; Rights Retention Strategy supported

    cOAlition S has been diplomatic about the change. Responding to the refresh, Executive Director Johan Rooryck said: “Five years on since Plan S was first published, it is entirely appropriate that funders are reviewing their OA policies to ensure they are effectively meeting their goals… Our collective dedication to making full and immediate OA a reality remains the driving force behind our collaboration.” Separately, Rooryck told Nature the refreshed policy is not “entirely in line” with cOAlition S guidance, while noting member funders retain “a lot of leeway” in how they implement shared principles. The Scholarly Kitchen nonetheless judges the policy relatively well aligned with Plan S’s repository route, since the accepted-manuscript deposit mandate — the mechanism that satisfies Plan S compliance — is retained, not replaced.

    Common Questions About the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy

    Does the Gates Foundation still pay APCs?

    No. Since the 2025 Open Access Policy took effect on 1 January 2025, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation no longer pays article processing charges for individual manuscripts. Publication fees are now the responsibility of grantees and co-authors, though the foundation continues to fund open infrastructure and select publisher arrangements.

    Does the Gates Foundation require preprints?

    Yes. Under the 2025 policy, every funded manuscript must be posted as a preprint on a foundation-recognised server carrying a CC BY 4.0 licence, in addition to the existing requirement to deposit the accepted manuscript in PubMed Central or another open repository. Grantees may seek an exemption only for documented ethical or safety concerns.

    Is the Gates Foundation still aligned with Plan S?

    Largely, yes. cOAlition S publicly welcomed the 2025 refresh, and analysts judge the policy broadly consistent with Plan S‘s repository route despite the APC-funding withdrawal. Executive Director Johan Rooryck said the update reflects funders “reviewing their OA policies,” while stopping short of declaring it fully in line with coalition guidance.

    What are the Gates Foundation’s data-sharing requirements?

    The 2025 policy requires underlying data to be openly accessible immediately once the funded manuscript becomes available — including at the preprint stage. This is earlier than the 2021 policy, which triggered the data-sharing mandate only once the accepted article was formally published in a journal.

    Implications and What to Watch Next

    For grantees without alternative funding, the squeeze is real: authors who relied on Gates APC support for DOAJ-listed open-access journals must now find a fee waiver, an institutional agreement, or a non-APC venue, while still meeting deposit and rights-retention requirements some publishers only accommodate via paid gold-OA routes. Research administrators managing multi-funder compliance will need to track this alongside UKRI and Wellcome Trust obligations, since the three funders no longer follow a uniform APC-support model despite shared Plan S origins.

    For publishers, immediate revenue exposure looks limited given the modest volume of Gates-funded output, but the policy adds pressure toward non-APC business models — waiver programmes, “pure publish” institutional agreements, and preprint-native platforms — that cOAlition S’s own “Beyond Article-Based Charges” working group, established with Jisc and PLOS, is separately examining.

    The signal for other funders is the more consequential story. Gates is the first cOAlition S founding member to formally withdraw central APC funding while retaining a Plan S-compatible repository mandate. Whether Wellcome Trust, UKRI, or other coalition funders follow with funding recalibrations — rather than eligibility or embargo changes — is the development worth monitoring as institutions plan multi-year compliance budgets.

    Research administrators managing multi-funder open access compliance can find related standards context in CASRAI’s research administration resources.