Open access fees

What are open access fees?

Open access fees are article processing charges (APC fees) collected by publishers. In open access journals (full open access, gold open access), authors pay an APC fee to have their article published, as the content of these journals is openly available to everyone without subscription fees. In hybrid journals (hybrid open access), authors can publish their article open access by paying a separate APC fee. Otherwise, the content of the journal is only available to readers who have paid a subscription fee, meaning the publisher collects fees from both authors and readers.

Aalto University recommends publishing in open access channels. Publishing in hybrid journals is acceptable only as part of transformative Read & Publish agreements.  

Read & Publish agreements

Read & Publish agreements provide researchers the possibility to access scientific journals and collections, and publish articles open access without APC fees for authors. Some of the agreements include only a discount on APC fees.

As a member of the FinELib consortium, Aalto provides transformative Read & Publish agreements with several publishers. Costs of these greements are covered by Aalto's Research Services. Read & Publish agreements primarily cover subscription journals as the agreements cover centrally both subscription fees and APC fees.

If a journal is not included in Aalto University's agreements

Apart from Read & Publish agreements, Aalto University does not have a central open access fund. If you publish in a journal which is not covered by our agreements, APC fee should be covered either through project funding or basic funding of the department. Please make sure to contact the controller of your own department for assistance in such cases.

Which open access fees do funders reimburse?

Calls opened before 1 January 2021 

EU and Research Council of Finland (former Academy of Finland) reimburse article processing charges as research costs of the project.

Calls opened after 1 January 2021

Funders committed to Plan S initiative, such as EU and Research Council of Finland (former Academy of Finland), encourage to publish in fully open access channels.

• Research Council of Finland: costs of ensuring open access to scientific publications published under the Research Council's funding terms and conditions (article processing charges (APC fees) required by the Plan S compliant journals that support immediate open access) can be covered by basic funding / included in the overheads of sites of research.
• Horizon Europe: only APC fees in full open access (gold open access) publication channels are eligible for reimbursement as direct project costs.

Diamond open access

Diamond open access refers to full open access journals and platforms which do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Often, these journals are smaller in terms of publication volume, and many of them are published by research organizations or learned societies.

In 2022, an international Action Plan for Diamond Open Access was prepared, with the aim to support and further develop diamond open access publishing model.  Plan S organisations, including Research Council of Finland (former Academy of Finland), support this action plan. 

You can search for open access journals that do not charge APC fees ("journals without APCs") in the DOAJ database.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

Diamond open access publishing in Aalto University

In 2023, we identified diamond open access journals in which Aalto's researchers have published in 2018-2022. According to the survey, approx. 2 % of Aalto's peer-reviewed scientific journal articles are published in diamond open access journals. The results of the survey are indicative.

Savolainen, E., & Seitsonen, K. (2023). Diamond Open Access: Researcher’s Best Friend or just a Distant Relative?. The 18th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing.

Diamond open access publishing and results of the survey were also discussed at a webinar held as a part of Aalto's Research Data Management & Open Science Training:

Current Trends in Academic Publishing: Diamond Open Access Journals, 24.10.2023

Open access fees paid by Aalto University

OpenAPC service includes open data of article processing charges (APC fees) paid by institutions outside transformative Read & Publish agreements. In Aalto, this data is based on combining data from Aalto’s research information system ACRIS (publication data) and Rondo (open access payments). OpenAPC displays information of journal articles at publisher, journal and article level, and data is updated four times a year. Information about APC fees of publication types A3 and A4 (peer-reviewed scientific book chapters and conference articles) is not integrated to OpenAPC.

In 2023, Aalto paid open access fees of journal articles worth of almost 450 000 EUR. 

Aalto University - Open APC

National monitoring of total costs of open access publishing

Total costs of open access and scientific publishing to Finnish institutions are monitored on a national level as part of the monitoring of open science and research in Finland. Currently, the monitoring covers e.g. subscription fees, transformative Read & Publish agreements and article and book processing charges (APC fees and BPC fees). For article processing charges, the monitoring utilizes data available in OpenAPC service.

Based on the data from 2021, Finnish institutes paid publishers 21 million euros for transformative agreements and an additional 4 million euros for separate article processing charges (APC fees).

Total costs of open access publishing in Finland 2021

Contact information

For any questions, please don't hesitate to contact Open Science and ACRIS team ([email protected]).