Information for UIUC researchers about open acces, including about the university policy on Open Access to Research Articles, approved by the UIUC Faculty Senate on October 19, 2015.

Article processing charges are fees that journal charge to publishing the article open access in advance of the publication. These charges are typically paid by the researcher, who may draw on grant funds or other sources to pay the fees depending on the situation. Generally APCs are paid after an article is accepted for publication and before it appears in the journal. APCs are distinct from submission fees, which are rare and should be looked on with suspicion by authors evaluating journals for quality.

APC amounts vary by journal, and they are not charged by all open access journals, particularly in the humanities where researchers rarely have grants to cover the fees.

BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC Series.

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.

List of no-fee open access journals that inlcudes subject category and publisher.

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPS) OASPA works to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant model of publication for scholarly outputs.

PLOS was founded as a nonprofit Open Access publisher, innovator and advocacy organization with a mission to advance progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. We believe that OPEN is a mindset that represents the best scientific values, bringing scientists together to share work as rapidly and widely as possible, to advance science faster and to benefit society as a whole.

PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Use this site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education. As a catalyst for action, SPARC focuses on collaborating with other stakeholders—including authors, publishers, libraries, students, funders, policymakers and the public—to build on the opportunities created by the Internet, promoting changes to both infrastructure and culture needed to make open the default for research and education.

Open access is an increasingly popular way to publish academic and scientific research. As of 2019, 8.5 million articles have been published open access in peer-reviewed journals, according to data from Scopus and ImpactStory