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Publishing and Open Access trends -- 2025: Home

More details about current deals that include Open Access licenses

New in 2025    Elsevier journals -- waivers for APCs for Open Access licenses in hybrid ScienceDirect journals.  Does not include gold journals or Cell and Clinics journals.  Here's the 2025 list of journals that qualify, at top.
 
Springer journals -- waivers for APCs for Open Access licenses in their Springer Hybrid journals (link goes to Google Sheet), but not in their Gold journals.  This also does not include the Nature or NPJ journals.
Please let me know if you have any problems or questions.  wiswellj@appstate.edu
 
Wiley journals -- waivers for APCs for Open Access licenses
We have a Read and Publish deal for all Wiley journals.  Which means we have permanent rights to read all their journals and we get zero-cost Open Access licenses for articles that our authors publish. 
Here are Wiley's journals, but these pages are difficult to use.  Ask your librarian, or me, for help.
We continue this deal with Wiley through 2027.  You have to be the corresponding author, and it has to be a research article or review of research (not book/software review).
Caution: In Wiley Gold (fully OA) journals, we might run out of credits in the last part of calendar year.  Assess risk with your librarian.

 
Cambridge journals -- no-cost OA licenses for all journals, no cap
 
American Chemical Society
 
The Microbiology Society (not the American Society of Microbiology)
 
Possibly in 2026 and beyond, as we renegotiate our Oxford, Sage, and other agreements, we'll cover their journals also. 
Other possibilities: APC deals in Springer Gold, Elsevier Gold, Taylor & Francis, and other Gold journals.  What else would you like to see? 
 

Problems for authors and libraries

There are fewer no-cost journal article "slots," while globally, more researchers want to publish more.

How to pay for Open Access?  (There are OA journals that do not charge authors, although they might be less visible.)

How to not get burned by inadequate peer review?

Details and causes:

  • Change and barriers in journal publishing. 
    • Funders requiring open access sooner.  Some publishers giving up on subscription models.  Illegal and non-compliant access.
    • Revenue from user information and from LLMs
  • More journals are requiring payments by authors.  They have fewer choices that do not require authors to pay.
  • New, growing journals with some inadequate or fraudulent peer review.  (Old journals that cannot find enough reviewers.)
  • Growing preference and acceptance of author-pays Open Access.  Why? More citations and greater influence on practitioners and public.
  • What about Green OA or author self-archiving?

What libraries are doing:

  • Negotiating Read and Publish (aka Transformational) agreements, that ideally will take us to an affordable open access future, one day.
  • Supporting Green open access, with repositories and advice.
  • Advising authors about remaining zero-cost journals, which may include those in Read & Publish deals.
  • Subscribe to Open, with many smaller publishers.  e.g., Annual Reviews, American Physiological Society

Two questions

We have transformative agreements with Wiley, Cambridge, Elsevier, and Springer and will consider others.  If these publishers transform to only Gold OA (author pays) journals, what happens to the approximately half million that we pay for subscriptions now?

What is an OA license worth?

What's going on in publishing? Where not to publish?

Where to publish? Where not to publish?

Check the journal in Web of Science, SCImago (uses Scopus), PubMed/MEDLINE, Cabell's.  Is it at least findable in Google Scholar?  If I detect a hint of anything substandard, I'll Google [journal name] predatory (and not believe everything).

Talk about these publishers for Public Health & Exercise Science

Journal of Environmental and Public Health (Hindawi, now Wiley's)

No longer accepting submissions.

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (MDPI)

Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (Frontiers)

My opinion -- We need these publishers, and we need them to do a good job in peer review.  And we need the traditional publishers.  And we need them all to have profit margins more moderate than the pharmaceutical industry's.

My advice for authors -- Think about risk on a continuum.  Avoid what looks like inadequate peer review.  For the next few years, have a balanced record that's not only Frontiers/MDPI/HIndawi.  What if you know the editor and it's a special issue on an important topic?

 

Also see

See library guides on Scholarly Communications and on PREPARE workshop 2018.

Remember our repository, NC DOCKS.

Any interest in preprint archives, such as BioRxiv, SportRxiv?

Health Sciences Librarian, Associate Professor

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John Wiswell

Email me! Levine Hall 542F & Belk Library 225, (828)262-7853