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What is open access?
Open access publishing allows free access to and distribution of published articles where the author retains copyright of their work by employing a Creative Commons attribution licence, therefore removing any barriers to access.
- Research that is freely available online
- Free to read, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish
- Author retains copyright not the publisher
- Complies with self-archiving mandates
What is article-processing charges(APC)?
Open access publishing is not without costs. BioMed Central defrays these costs through article-processing charges because it does not have subscription charges for its research content. The company instead believes that immediate, worldwide, barrier-free, open access to the full text of research articles is in the best interests of the scientific community.
What do the article-processing charges pay for?
- Immediate, worldwide open access to the full article text
- Developing and maintaining electronic tools for peer review and publication
- Preparation in various formats for online publication
- Securing inclusion in PubMed as soon as possible after publication
- Securing full text inclusion in a number of permanent archives such as INIST (France), Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Netherlands) and arXiv.org (USA)
- Securing inclusion in CrossRef, enabling electronic citation in other journals that are available electronically
Which funding agencies explicitly allow direct use of their grants to cover article-processing charges?
Many funding agencies allow the use of grants for this purpose and an increasing number, such as the Wellcome Trust, Research Council UK, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the US National Institutes for Health, strongly encourage open access publication. The following is a list of funding agencies we know of that have confirmed that they allow the payment of article-processing charges:
- Academy of Finland (Finland)
- California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (US)
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Canada)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)
- Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (Spain)
- Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy)
- Danmarks Grundforskningsfond (Denmark)
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany)
- FAPESP (Brazil)
- Fondazione Telethon (Italy)
- Fonds zur Forderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Austria)
- Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Belgium)
- Health Research Board (Ireland)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Indian Council of Medical Research (India)
- INSERM (France)
- International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (International)
- Israel Science Foundation (Israel)
- Max Planck Society (Germany)
- National Institutes of Health (US) Are you an NIH grantee? More details
- National Science Foundation (US)
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Netherlands)
- Research Council UK (RCUK). RCUK is a strategic partnership of the UK Research Councils, which include the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Natural Environment Research Council.
- Rockefeller Foundation (US)
- South African Medical Research Council (South Africa)
- Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (Sweden)
- Swedish Research Council (Sweden)
- Swiss National Science Foundation (Switzerland)
- Wellcome Trust (UK) More details
For more detailed information, see BioMed Central's summary table of biomedical funder policies on open access.
