Support for Open Access Publishing in 2025: The Library's Read and Publish Agreements
The Library offers support for Open Access (OA) publishing, including assistance with OA publishing fees through Read and Publish Agreements. These agreements allow RMIT authors to have OA publishing fees waived or discounted when their articles are accepted in certain journals.
An upcoming session will provide an overview of the Library's OA support and offer detailed guidance on publishing in journals covered by these agreements.
Wednesday, February 12. 2:30 - 3:30PM
Register via link below:
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
Read and Publish agreements or Transformative agreements enable RMIT authors to publish in open access journals without incurring article processing charges (APCs). In 2024, the Library has signed up to 19 Read and Publish agreements to support open access publishing.
Note: Some exclusions may apply depending on the current agreement year, publisher and publishing cap.
The corresponding author must be affiliated with RMIT University for the publication to be eligible. This covers anyone with an RMIT email address, including Australia and Vietnam staff and students.
|
To make sure your manuscript is considered for an APC fee waiver or discount:
|
Note: If you are a co-author your work may be eligible if the corresponding author is from a university that also has a Read and Publish agreement with the publisher. After the peer review process and acceptance of the manuscript, the publisher will let you know if your work can be published openly under an agreement.
The agreements run from 1 January to 31 December each year. Most publishers offer an APC waiver or discount if the manuscript acceptance date falls within the agreement period, but specific details vary between publishers.
See the Library's Read and Publish agreements page for an up-to-date list of publishers covered by Read and Publish agreements.
Not all publications from each publisher will be covered by a Read and Publish agreement. To find relevant journals, access the 'Read and Publish Agreement Title Lists' on the Library's Read and Publish agreements page (Note: Both lists contain the same titles).
Note: Vietnam staff can use the RMIT student option to access lists instantly, or request access to the staff option during work hours (Australian Eastern Standard Time).
The Library's Research metrics guide includes resources for checking journal rankings.
Contact the Library Research Services team for assistance.
You can contact the Library Research Services team to make suggestions, but please note the agreements result from a negotiation between CAUL (The Council of Australasian University Librarians) and the publishing companies. The Library, however, will continue to contribute to the development of these agreements with CAUL.
The Read and Publish agreements repurpose existing journal subscription expenditure. Fully open access publishers do not charge subscription fees, and so CAUL cannot negotiate with them to repurpose existing expenditure.
Browse this guide to consider other options for making your research openly available.
As with all publishing agreements, you need to carefully read and fully understand what author rights (copyright) you are retaining and what rights you may be forfeiting. See the Copyright, author rights and Creative Commons licenses page in this guide for further information.
Article processing charges (APCs) are fees charged to the author or creator to cover the cost of publishing and disseminating an article, rather than charging the potential reader of the article via library or individual journal subscriptions. APCs may apply to both commercial and open access publications.
Before you pay a journal to publish your research article, check:
Adapted from "Before paying APCs" by The University of Queensland Library is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
RMIT University Library does not provide funds for article processing charges (APCs).
There are Read and Publish agreements the Library has signed with a number of scholarly publishers. When publishing in journals covered by these agreements, you may be able to publish directly to open access with no transactional APCs. Submit your publications as usual, and if the Library has an agreement in place, the publisher will alert you to an open access option on acceptance of the eligible article.
Note: Some exclusions and caps may apply to some journals.
If there is an APC required to publish your research, it is recommended that this cost be built into the initial grant application. In Australia, the APCs are usually covered by grants, or by the authors themselves.
As an RMIT researcher, you can choose to make the accepted manuscript available via the RMIT Research Repository under the Green open access model and avoid paying any APCs. This will satisfy the mandates for open access as required by both ARC and NHMRC and will result in your research being openly available (after any embargo periods) to the broader community.
Adapted from "Do I need to pay APCs?" by The University of Queensland Library is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Not all open access journals charge article processing charges (APCs), and many will waive the fees for researchers who cannot afford them. Use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to locate open access journals that do not charge APCs.
This Library guide by RMIT University Library is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, except where otherwise noted. All reasonable efforts have been made to clearly label material where the copyright is owned by a third party and ensure that the copyright owner has consented to this material being presented in this library guide. The RMIT University logo is ‘all rights reserved’.