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.