Do I need to pay an APC to meet my research funder’s public access requirement?
Answer
APCs or Article Processing Charges, are only assessed by certain open access (OA) journals—what’s known as Gold OA. Gold OA is only one path to meeting funders’ public access mandates. Some OA journals do not assess any APCs at all—what’s known as Platinum or Diamond OA. Another common option is to deposit your paper in an open repository. This is known as Green OA. If you use the Green OA path, and also publish in a traditional subscription-based journal, you will need to check with your publisher to see what version of the paper they allow you to deposit. Many do not allow you to deposit the actual printed version, but will allow the submitted manuscript to be deposited.
Most funders do not have any specific requirements as to where you can deposit your papers. There are many subject specific preprint servers such as arXiv for physics and math. Most universities have institutional repositories for their own scholarly output. Illinois Tech’s Institutional Repository, https://repository.iit.edu, is a good option. It is crawled by Google Scholar and indexed by several other services.