An article processing charge (APC) is a fee which is charged to authors to allow for immediate, unrestricted access to the full version of the article. APCs are paid by the author, the author’s funding body, or their institution.
Traditionally, academic journals have covered the costs related to publishing by selling content to institutions and individuals. With this model, only the individuals with access to a personal or institutional subscription can access the content. With open access publishing, the purchase model is inverted; payment is made to the publisher at the article level upon publication, resulting in everyone having access to the published content.
Open access does not mean free to publish or that the costs associated with publishing are suddenly removed. Without the proceeds from an APC, not-for-profit publishers, like Canadian Science Publishing, would risk going out of business as a result of lost subscription sales. The production of open access journals has many of the same costs as subscription journals, such as peer review coordination, copyediting, production and layout, technical support, distribution, marketing, archiving and much more. Added to these costs is the need to constantly update the technology, platforms and metadata that make online journals accessible and discoverable. To compensate for these costs, and in order to continue publishing high-quality scientific research as open access, FACETS charges a competitively priced APC.
For more information on open access at FACETS, please visit our open access information section.
Information for Authors
The APC for all paper types except Comments, invited Replies, and Editorials is $1,350 CAD plus applicable taxes for researchers in Canada and $1,350 USD for researchers outside of Canada (no taxes apply). The APC for Comments and Editorials is $500 CAD plus applicable taxes for researchers in Canada and $500 USD for researchers outside of Canada (no taxes apply). There is no charge for invited Replies.
APCs are paid upon acceptance of the manuscript after the peer review process. Some funders or institutions may have funds available for open access publishing costs and some even require that researchers use their grant funds to cover any open access APCs. Review the terms of your funding grant as they relate to open access. For information on institutional author funds, communicate with your librarian.
Please visit our fees & payment section for more information.
Information for Librarians & Other Funding Bodies
FACETS is the first multidisciplinary open access science journal in Canada. Canadian Science Publishing, publisher of FACETS, believes that open access journals should not differ in quality and expertise of content. Canadian Science Publishing offers institutional memberships and accounts for librarians or other research institutions interested in either purchasing APCs in bulk or subsidizing the cost of the APC for their researchers. For more information, please contact [email protected].