Publishing Your Scholarly Output: Author Fees

Author fees are set amounts that the submitting author(s) must pay in order to be published. They occur in the following contexts:

• in many Open Access journals where the reader doesn't have to pay anything - the author fee is the source of revenue to keep the journal operational
• in some traditional journals where the author is typically expected to transfer copyright to the journal, there is an option to pay a fee and retain the copyright. In this case, the author fee is seen as compensation for the loss of revenue because not all copies of the article will be behind the journal's paywall. 

Author fees range from $150 on the low end to over $5000. 

• It is acceptable and expected to build your anticipated author fee into any grants you apply for. 
• New! UUP IDA funds can now be applied to charges associated with publishing, which includes APCs.
• SUNY Empire does not currently pay for faculty members' APCs.
• Some journals and vendors who own multiple journals have agreements with subscribing academic institutions to waive part of author fees for authors from that institution. Please Ask A Librarian if we have an agreement with your publisher that would cut down your costs.
  • This is also a good time to double-check that the journal is a legitimate one and not a scam.

As you can imagine, taking in author fees and running a free content management system in some offshore location where server farms are cheap is a great way to make a little cash for someone who's lacking in the ethics department. If they do actually put your article on their site, they're not even breaking the law. So what is the difference between that kind of shady operation and a legitimate Open Access journal, which is also taking author fees and publishing only online?

A legitimate Open Access journal:

• has a history (even if it is very short, look at the history of the institution behind it), a (good) reputation, and a place in the scholarly conversation.
• provides a level of service to its readers - you won't find bad spelling, broken scripts on the webpages, broken links, tons of downtime, terrible articles.
• provides a level of service to its authors - you won't find many complaints about it when you Google it, for one thing. Someone will respond to your emails promptly and professionally. The peer reviewers will do their job - you'll get good suggestions. They'll be picky about the right things - your ethics paperwork, your citations, your research methods and statistical analysis, image quality, requirements for data management. 

All that labor is what your author fee is going toward, not sunscreen and umbrella drinks.