How to read an APC

The number on a journal's fee page is a list price. It is the starting point for a calculation, not the end of one. This is what sits between the number and the invoice.

Currency is not a conversion

Publishers quote in dollars, euros and pounds, and the three prices are set independently. They are not conversions of one another, and the currency you are charged in is usually decided by your country, not by you. When exchange rates move, one currency's price becomes the better deal for a while, and nothing on the fee page will tell you which. We show every fee in US dollars for comparability and record the date we checked. If the publisher quotes your currency directly, that figure is the one to use.

Tax

Depending on where you are and where the publisher is, value-added tax may be added at invoice. Institutions can sometimes reclaim it. Individuals usually cannot. If the fee page says "excluding VAT", assume the invoice will be larger than the number you are looking at.

When you pay

Almost always at acceptance, before publication, and almost always the invoice goes to the corresponding author. Payment before peer review is not how legitimate journals work. A journal that asks for money at submission, other than a clearly labelled submission fee, is telling you something about itself.

What the APC is not

A submission fee is charged at submission and is not refunded on rejection. Some fields have them; economics is one. They are separate from the APC, and waivers usually do not cover them.

Page charges, colour figure charges and excess-length fees belong to the subscription era and survive in some journals. They apply regardless of open access status. Read the author guidelines to the end; these are rarely on the fee page.

Fees for faster handling are a reason to look elsewhere.

Hybrid means optional

In a hybrid journal the APC buys the open access option. Decline it and your article is published behind the paywall at no charge to you, and you can usually deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository after an embargo. Whether that satisfies your funder depends on the funder. Whether it satisfies your readers depends on where your readers are.

Who actually pays

In order of preference: a grant that allows publication costs, an institutional open access fund, a library agreement, a waiver, and last, you. The last option is the one to avoid with the most effort, because it is the only one that comes out of a salary. If you find yourself about to pay personally, the discount request is worth sending first, and the comparison pages will tell you whether a journal of equivalent standing would cost nothing.

Why every number here carries a date

Publishers revise fees, usually once a year and usually upward. Every figure on this site shows when it was last checked against the publisher's own page. A figure older than a year is a figure to verify before you rely on it, and the page will say so.