Institutional Open Access and Transformative Agreements

Institutional Open Access Supports the Research Communities Served by APS

The American Physical Society (APS) has been experimenting with Institutional Open Access agreements since 2014. Such agreements facilitate the open access publication of articles submitted by authors affiliated with participating research institutions.

These agreements are integrated into the manuscript submission and handling process and provide many benefits to authors as well as their institutions and funders:

• the Version of Record of eligible articles are published immediately open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) license,
• published articles are compliant with the open access mandates and policies of authors’ institutions and funders,
• authors retain copyright,
• no direct costs to authors, and
• invoicing and payment of individual Article Publication Charges (APCs) and other administrative burdens are eliminated.

Transformative Agreements

Transformative Agreements aim to transform payments to a publisher from libraries, universities, and/or research institutions (or the consortium or funder representing them) away from reading articles on a subscription basis and towards publishing articles on an open access basis.

APS piloted its first Transformative Agreements in 2020. These Read and Publish Agreements bundle together two services valued by researchers – read access to all the Physical Review Journals, plus institutional open access publishing – and offset library subscription costs with credits towards open access publishing.

APS continues to invest in improving the operational infrastructure that supports open access agreements, and is grateful to a number of trusted library partners for their open collaboration and cooperation towards further developing this program in support of increasing high-quality and sustainable open access options for the researchers we collectively serve.

Current APS Read and Publish Agreements

APS has reached Read and Publish Agreements with a growing number of organizations to allow eligible authors to publish open access at no cost to themselves. A summary detailing the terms and conditions of each agreement is linked to the name of each agreement:

• The Bibsam Consortium, Sweden
• The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland
• King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia
• Lib4RI – Library for the Research Institutes within the ETH Domain: Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL
• Max Planck Society/Max Planck Digital Library, Germany
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), United States of America
• UK (Jisc) Open Access Agreement

Open Access in High-Energy Physics: SCOAP3

APS participates in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) initiative, enabling high-energy physics articles published in Physical Review Letters, Physical Review C, and Physical Review D to be published open access without cost to authors based on their arXiv category.

Find out more about this initiative and how to participate.

Open Access Waiver Policy

Article Publication Charge (APC) waivers for open access publication are available for submitting authors from many lower- and middle-income countries. Further information can be found here.