USU Libraries has signed a new contract with IOP Science that allows corresponding authors from USU to publish their manuscripts open access with no fee.

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Open access research is free for readers to access and reuse. It’s beneficial for authors because it means more readers, more potential collaborators, more citations, and ultimately more recognition for your work. It’s also a critical mechanism for making research accessible to the scholars, policy makers and community members who can’t afford the hefty prices publishers charge to get past their paywalls.

“Lots of journals have flipped to open access publishing models,” explains Scholarly Communication Librarian Erica Finch. “But since readers aren’t being charged to access that content, some journals have started charging authors to publish instead.”

Article Processing Charges, or APCs, are charged to authors after the article has passed through peer review and been accepted for publication. An APC can run from a few hundred dollars to over $10,000.

The new agreement with IOP Science means that USU-affiliated authors can publish open access in almost all IOP Science journals without paying the APC. To take advantage of this agreement, you must be the corresponding author and you must use your institutional email address at time of submission. IOP Science will send a notification asking you to opt-in to open access at no charge.

In addition to the agreement with IOP Science, USU Libraries already has similar deals in place with ACM, Cambridge University Press, and Taylor & Francis. There are also discounted APCs available to USU-affiliated corresponding authors who publish with MDPI and Royal Society.