You may be able to publish Open Access (OA) with no article processing charges (APCs) through our publisher agreements and memberships, as the fees are covered by terms and conditions. These agreements include many leading commercial and society publishers and are typically available to both funded and unfunded staff and student authors.
- Use our Library OA agreement search tool to check if a particular journal is covered and follow the link under 'Who Pays' to view eligibility criteria and procedures.
- Use our list of Agreements to check whether a publisher and the type of journal are covered.
What if a journal is not listed in the Search Tool?
Depending on any funding acknowledged in your article and the OA model of the journal, funding may still be available to support payment of OA charges. Full details of how to check are detailed below.
Fully Open Access Journals
If you are a staff member or emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham* and your name will appear as an author acknowledging the University of Birmingham as your primary affiliation (*See the Research Publications Policy for details), you may be eligible for funding to cover open access charges for manuscripts submitted to fully open access journals published by the listed publishers.
Please be advised that if you plan to submit your work to a fully open access journal published by BMJ, Frontiers Media, PeerJ, Sage, or Springer Nature (including BMC), there is additional information you are required to review.
If BHF, UKRI or Wellcome Trust funding is NOT acknowledged, and you hold no funding to pay for the open access fee:
- Please review the information provided in the ‘Fee-based full open access’ section of the Publishing open access journal articles intranet page (login required).
If BHF, UKRI, or Wellcome Trust funding is acknowledged, and the relevant block grant funds remain available:
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Check if the journal is listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
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If it appears on DOAJ, and your published article will acknowledge funding from BHF, UKRI or the Wellcome Trust, complete a Staff Open Access fee payment request form.
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This form should be completed when your manuscript is submission-ready, as approval is not guaranteed and options are limited after journal acceptance.
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Please ensure that full details of all acknowledged funders, including those held externally by any co-authors, are provided to prevent successful applications from being withdrawn due to inaccuracies.
Hybrid Journals
Library-managed funding is not normally available for articles in hybrid (subscription-based) journals, except where the journal is in a Transitional Agreement.
If your funding does not come from UKRI, Wellcome Trust, or British Heart Foundation, check our funder pages to see if you can apply for OA costs directly from your funder.
What if funds are not available to publish OA in my journal of choice?
Under Rights Retention, University staff can make their accepted manuscripts immediately open access via the self-archiving route. Rights Retention also applies to PGR students who opt into the University’s Research Publications Policy (DOCX - 96 KB).
The published version of your manuscript will be accessible only to the journal's subscribers, but readers can cite your published work because your self-archived version is openly accessible.
If your funder's OA policy is incompatible with the journal’s OA policy, you will not be able to publish in that journal.