Author Charges in Publishing

Academic authors may pay a variety of charges in scholarly publishing, from APCs (“author publication charges”) for open access, to page charges, to color charges.  Some of these charges

Up-front costs

• Page charges – n% of journals across disciplines charge APCs (author page charges); this varies across disciplines
• Color charges – Charges for color figures
• Submission fees / Review charges
• Supplemental Materials charges
• Late Change charges – Charges for significant edits late in the production process.
• Overlength charges –
• Copyright registration charges – For dissertation and thesis authors, ProQuest and some university/colleges offer copyright registration services. Journal publishers will typically register copyright in their journal issue, and not in individual articles. Note: Registration of copyright is useful if you plan to make commercial re-use of your work; but registration is not necessary to prevent unauthorized re-use, or to have a copyright.
• Licensing and Permission charges – If third party material is included in the article that is beyond fair use, or the publisher does not acknowledge fair use, an author may have to pay licensing and permission charges.

• Open access charges – Charges paid to a journal to make the article available open access.  Some journals now charge variable prices for different licenses, for instance, CC-BY (Creative Commons with Attribution) versus CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons with Attribution and a Non-Commercial Re-Use requirement)
• APCs – This might mean “author page charge”, “author publication charge”, “article processing charge” or some variant thereof.

• Post-publication costs

• Re-use of your own paper – If authors assign their copyright to the publisher, and fail to reserve rights for themselves to re-use, then they may be charged to re-use their own figures or text in subsequent publications.
• Offprint fees – If you want to distribute a paper you may end up having to pay fees to re-distribute the paper to colleagues.
• Licensing fees – If you want to use your article to teach, you (or your institution) may need to be fees for use in e-reserves or coursepacks. Other instructors, faculty, and university libraries will have to pay licensing as well.