Post by Jason Boczar, Digital Scholarship and Publishing Librarian in Integrated Research & Impact Services and Rachel Bomberger, Serials Librarian in Collections & Discovery, USF Libraries.
Open Access Week is always held in October and the 2026 theme is “The Cost of Knowledge.” Open Access is described as the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” While the readers of Open Access research benefit from the cost being free, for the creators, there are costs associated with research.
For instance, let’s consider the most common way for researchers to publish: peer-reviewed academic journals. There are thousands of open access journals that do not require any fees for someone to read the article or for the author to publish in the journal.[1] However, there are thousands of open access journals that charge article processing charges (APCs)[2] and even more subscription journals that charge APCs if the author chooses to make their article immediately open access on the publisher site.
Many of these APCs can be quite large. For instance, one of the largest APC charges is with Nature Communications which charges authors $7,350.00 per article. More moderate in their APCs is the suite of PLOS One journals, which range between $1,088 and $6,460.
There are many ways to fund these APCs. One way is to write the cost into your grant funding when applicable. Another is to seek institutional funding from your department or even the USF Faculty Senate Council on Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (CReSCA).
For USF faculty, staff, and students, another way is to publish with one of the academic publishers that the USF Libraries have partnered with via a transformative agreement. Academic libraries usually pay a subscription fee to provide access to its patrons for journal content provided by a publisher. In a transformative agreement, the library pays the publisher not only to provide access to their content but also for 1) a discount or 2) a waiver of the APCs for employees at their college or university who want to publish their article as open access. a transformative agreement is also known as a “read and publish agreement” where the “read” portion provides access to the publisher’s content and the “publish” portion provides for the discount or waiver of the APCs. There are two types of journals that can be covered by a transformative agreement. A gold open access journal contains only open access articles, whereas a hybrid journal contains both open access and subscription access articles. The open access articles in a hybrid journal had the APC paid for by the author or waived because of a transformative agreement with the publisher.
Not every publisher offers a transformative agreement, and even if they do, not every publisher has the same terms. Some limit the eligible journals covered by the agreement. Some have a cap on the number of authors that can publish each year. There are also cost variations. One publisher might offer a transformative agreement without an increase in cost, where another may charge extra for APC discounts and waivers. Publishers may base the cost or cap on the number of authors who published in their eligible journals the previous year. As more authors publish in these journals because of the transformative agreement, the cost that the library pays might go up the next year.
Because USF Libraries are not allocated additional funding to cover the costs of open access publishing, they are able to enter into these agreements only when they do not incur costs beyond that of a traditional subscription. At the moment, USF Libraries has transformative agreements with eight publishers: the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, the Institute of Physics, MDPI, Oxford University Press, the Royal Society of Chemistry and Springer Nature. For information on journal and author eligibility, caps and how to apply for APC discounts and waivers, see the USF Libraries webpage on Understanding Open Access webpage. Each of the above publishers is listed there with application instructions and applicable title lists, and any new transformative agreements will be added there as well.
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Notes
[1] 14,503 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of October 7, 2026.
[2] 9,074 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of October 7, 2026.