Open Access

Author Fees, Dalhousie Memberships and Negotiated Discounts

Open Access has provided great benefits to readers by making scholarly content freely available without the barrier of subscription fees. However authors who choose to publish in Gold Open Access journals must anticipate an Author Processing Charge (APC) that is levied by the journal publisher to cover publishing costs.

When possible, authors should include these APCs in their grant application if the journal they prefer to publish in is using this model.  CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC all provide grant funds to cover APCs.

Dalhousie does not have an author fund to directly cover the cost associated with Author Processing Charges (APCs)

The following Dalhousie memberships and discounts are currently available. Never assume that a discount will be automatically applied. Always check with the publisher to confirm the discount.

• American Chemical Society: Dalhousie authors receive a 25% discount on ACS Author Choice Open Access services (APCs)
• Cambridge Journals: Members are eligible for a 20% discount on Article Processing Charges (APC). All Gold OA or
  Hybrid OA Cambridge journals are eligible.
  The discount is applied when an author submits the article to RightsLink. During the APC payment process, select “Apply Discount” and enter the token NEDXN35SY6A7GPKI4E96 .These tokens do not expire and can be re-used an indefinite number of times. If you encounter any problems using this system when submitting an article to RightsLink, please contact Sara Forsyth (sforsyth@cambridge.org) and copy Émilie Lavallée-Funston (elavalleefunston@crkn.ca).
• BioMed Central: Dalhousie Libraries have a supporter membership with BMC. This provides a 15% discount off the normal APCs through this publisher for their fully Open Access journals (hybrid journals not included) and SpringerOpen titles.  Manuscripts submitted from a Dalhousie IP will have the discount automatically applied. Manuscript submitted using a non-registered IP address should activate the option to select Dalhousie in order to receive the discount.
• National Research Council of Canada (NRC): Canadian Science Publishing has reduced the fee for Dalhousie authors from $3000  to $1500. The reduced fee is a result of our membership in the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) 2018-2021 license agreement.
• Open Library of the Humanities (OLH): Dalhousie is a supporting institution contributing to the library partnership subsidy model. The result is no APC for authors wishing to publish in an OLH journal.
• Sage: A 40% discount is available to Dalhousie authors as a result of the library's subscription to the SAGE journal package. The responsibility for claiming this discount will rest on the researcher, and researchers shall identify themselves as members of the faculty of CRKN and as participants of this Agreement.

  Gold open access journals

  For articles accepted for publication in a gold open access journal (a journal in which all content is published open access under a Creative Commons licence – visit the journal’s individual website on SAGE Journals to find out if it’s an open access journal) the author should email APCqueries@sagepub.co.uk when they are asked to arrange payment of the APC. The author should include the following information:

  • Article ID
  • Article title
  • Journal
  • Institutional affiliation and state that they are eligible for the CRKN 40% discount.

  • The open access team will verify that the institution is a member of CRKN and will provide the author with a discount code and instructions on how to apply the code at checkout in the payment system.

     

    Hybrid open access (SAGE Choice)

    For articles accepted for publication in traditional subscription journals, authors can opt-in to pay the open access article processing charge (APC) and have the article made open access on publication through SAGE’s hybrid programme, SAGE Choice.

    Note that some subscription journals do not offer open access publication through SAGE Choice – a list of these can be found here.

    On acceptance of the article, the author should email openaccess@sagepub.com to request open access for their article. The author should include the following information:

  • Article ID
  • Article title
  • Journal

  • The author should also quote the institution that they are affiliated with and that they are eligible for the CRKN 40% discount.

    The open access administrator will then check the institution against the list of CRKN members and will send the author the contributor form to sign. On returning the form, the author should also provide the billing information for the invoice.

    Once the form is returned and the author is verified as eligible for the CRKN discount, an invoice will be generated for 40% off the APC for that journal. The standard APC for SAGE Choice is $3,000 USD. With the discount applied this will be $1,800 USD (plus tax). A list of journals with non-standard APC rates can be found here.