Publication fees (APC)

List of Paris-Saclay University’s APC agreements

In most cases, online journal subscriptions are the subject of national, annual, or multi-year negotiations between the Couperin consortium and the relevant publishers.

Some of these negotiations provide for full or partial coverage of the APC costs:

• Through a voucher system (ie an access to prepaid APCs, free of charge for the author)
• Or through discounts on the price of APCs

Authors affiliated with the scientific community of Paris-Saclay University may benefit from some of these agreements, a list of which is available below.

Discounts or prepaid article processing charges (APCs) are automatically applied based on the author’s affiliation with Paris-Saclay University. It is therefore your responsibility to provide your full affiliation to the publisher.

The purpose of this table is to list the agreements currently available to authors within the academic community of Paris-Saclay University. It is not intended to encourage publication with the publishers listed below. 

What is an APC?

What is an APC?

APCs (“Article Processing Charges”) are publication fees. They allow the author of a scientific article to publish it as open access, so that the full text is available free of charge to any reader.

APCs are paid for by the author or, more often, by the author’s institution of affiliation. The business model is therefore the “author-pays” model.

Two types of scientific journals may require payment of APCs:

•  fully Open access journals: APCs are often mandatory in these journals.
• hybrid journals, which feature both subscription-based and open access articles. In this type of journal, APCs are optional, and authors always have the option to choose traditional publication via a paid subscription;

Certain additional fees (such as charges for color figures or extra pages) are not included in APCs. APCs apply only to the option for authors to publish in open access. 

Do I have to pay APCs to publish in open access?

Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to publish in open access without having to pay publication fees.

To do so, we encourage you to look for journals that do not charge APCs:

Check the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to see if the journal in which you wish to publish charges APCs and, if so, how much. You can search by subject, journal title, or publisher, then refine your search using the “Without fees” filter. 

Consider alternative models, such as overlay-journals with Episciences.org, or open access journals distributed by the Mersenne Center, SciPost, Knowledge Unlatched, LingOA, MathOA, OpenEdition, and others.

Learn more about open access publishing on our dedicated page.

How much does it cost?

Each year, publication costs amount to tens of millions of euros for French institutions. Regardless of the type of journal chosen, it is important to ensure that the APC cost for a single paper remains reasonable. These charges can vary significantly from one journal to another and from one publisher to another. Thus, the average cost of APCs is estimated at:

•  approximately €2,000 for a fully open access journal.
•  approximately €2,500 for a hybrid journal.

Note: This is only an average. Some publishers charge exorbitant rates exceeding €4,000 (with certain prestigious journals charging article processing charges of €10,000).

Warning: Some publishers increase their rates by charging, in addition to APCs, additional fees for pages and/or color figures.

Authors must remain vigilant throughout the entire process, from article submission to publication: the fact that the article is subject to APCs may be indicated by a simple, vague checkbox with no option to opt out, even if the APCs are optional.

It is strongly recommended that you always check the journal’s open access policy before submitting, for example by consulting the Open Policy database or the Mir@bel knowledge base (Mutualization of Information on Journals and Their Access in Online Databases).

Non-agreement APCs

In the event that publication fees are not covered by any of the agreements outlined above, they may be paid by the first author’s research unit.

In this case, it is important that administrators have all the necessary information to fill out the purchase orders as accurately as possible. The annual tracking of APC expenses incurred by Paris-Saclay research units is crucial for negotiating agreements on electronic resources with commercial publishers.

Regardless of the payment method (unit’s card, researcher’s personal card, quote, purchase order, invoice, European project, etc.), it is essential that all information necessary to identify the published paper (the first few words of the title, name of the journal, etc.) be included on the purchase documents.

Some publishers offer to split the invoice among the various authors. This can make the amounts on these “split invoices” seem more acceptable. It is therefore essential to request that the total amount of the article processing charges (APCs) and each author’s share be listed on the invoices to facilitate the tracking of these expenses by laboratory administrators, the institutions’ financial and accounting departments, or your librarians.

HAL deposit

Whichever publication path you may chose, researchers at Paris-Saclay University are strongly encouraged to upload the full text of their papers on HAL, with or without an embargo. For more information, please visit our page on the matter