Open access

Article Processing Charges or APCs have become the dominant funding model for Open Access (OA) publishing, especially amongst commercial publishers. In this model, the author (or their surrogate) pays the publisher a fee to get their article published OA. APCs vary in amount, from a few hundred pounds to several thousand, and the most prestigious journals will frequently be the most expensive. Hybrid journals tend to have more expensive APCs than pure OA journals, and some pure OA journals do not charge an APC, rather they will be funded by individual institutions or membership models.

Some Universities have a dedicated fund for the payment of APCs. Victoria University of Wellington's strategy is to ask researchers, where possible, to deposit papers into our open access institutional repository. This makes content openly available for free.

• Make your papers open
• Find APCs for major academic journal publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Sage, Taylor & Francis & Wiley)

• Green OA: deposit or self-archive published or unpublished works in Victoria's Research Archive - Te Puna Rangahau, or subject archives like arXiv.org, SSRN  and RePeC, enabling free access. Check SHERPA/RoMEO to determine publisher policies on self-archiving: pre-print (pre-peer review version), post-print (post-peer review) or publisher PDF
• Gold OA: publish in a hybrid OA/subscription journal, or a fully OA journal. Check the DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO for journal options and details of article processing charges (APCs) or fees (APFs)
• Use the dissemin service to search for copies of your papers in open repositories and identify those that cannot be accessed.
• Establish an open access journal using Victoria's Open Journal Systems
• Many funders require or encourage open access publishing, archiving and/or data archiving as a condition of grant allocations. Search SHERPA/JULIET by country or funder name to determine policies.

When selecting an OA journal in which to publish, identify reputable publishers:

• ​look for a review history, an established publisher or society, endorsements by reputable researchers (check DOAJ, Publons journal list)
• be wary of less reputable open access publishers, predatory or unethical, with limited editorial services or peer review. 
• check journal websites for peer review practices and article processing charges
• review a journal's editorial board
• find out if and where a journal is indexed by searching Ulrichsweb