How JournalFees compares — and who it's for
Most tools in this space answer a different question than ours. Here is the honest map — and where each neighbour is stronger, because several are also our sources.
Other services tell you whether a journal is open access, whether you may self-archive, or whether your grant complies with a policy. We tell you what publishing will actually cost you, and whether you qualify to pay less or nothing — with a date on every number.
Where we sit next to the tools you know
DOAJ
The index of open-access journals. It records that a waiver exists; we record its conditions. It dates the review of a record; we date the verification of a price against the publisher's page.
Where DOAJ is stronger: 23,000 journals and 50+ metadata fields; the authority on whether a journal is legitimately OA.
What we add: the cost side — amount, waiver conditions, agreements. DOAJ →
Sherpa Romeo
Answers whether you may deposit a manuscript in a repository, which version, and with what embargo — self-archiving rights, not money.
Where Sherpa Romeo is stronger: decades of policy coverage across tens of thousands of titles, trusted by funders and repositories.
What we add: the cost side of the same decision — it will not tell you an APC or whether a waiver applies to you. Sherpa Romeo →
Journal Checker Tool
Answers whether a journal + funder + institution combination complies with Plan S, including via an agreement.
Where Journal Checker Tool is stronger: authoritative on Plan S compliance logic and institution-level agreement matching.
What we add: the numbers behind the routes, and options (waivers, negotiation) when the answer is “no route”. We use its CC0 data and link back. Journal Checker Tool →
ESAC Registry
The reference catalog of transformative agreements — which publishers, which consortia. Written at the agreement level, for libraries.
Where ESAC Registry is stronger: completeness and authority on the agreements themselves.
What we add: the author-level view: journal by journal, with prices and waiver conditions alongside coverage. ESAC Registry →
OpenAPC
Aggregates what institutions actually paid, from real invoices — retrospective and empirical.
Where OpenAPC is stronger: ground truth on money actually spent, at the scale of institutional reporting.
What we add: current list prices verified with dates, plus the conditions under which you avoid them. Theirs says what was paid; ours says what is asked. OpenAPC →
Wikidata
Holds APC values for some journals, crowd-maintained; coverage and freshness are uneven.
Where Wikidata is stronger: open, linked, and community-owned.
What we add: dated verification. We contribute back via a QuickStatements export, so our figures flow into Wikidata rather than compete with it. Wikidata →
Publisher websites
The primary source — and the reason we exist. Every price we publish is read from the publisher's own fee page, dated.
Where Publisher websites is stronger: the definitive figure, always.
What we add: the reading, the receipts and the side-by-side view — publisher pages are scattered across hundreds of sites and cannot be compared.
What authors get
You have one practical question: what will this journal cost me, and can I legitimately pay less or nothing? The site is built around it.
A verified price with a date
A figure read from the publisher's fee page, with the day we read it. If we haven't verified a price, the field is empty — an honest blank beats a confident guess.
Waiver conditions, not just checkmarks
Eligibility differs in ways that decide real cases: at Wiley and Sage only the corresponding author's country matters; at Elsevier every author must qualify; at PLOS eligibility follows the funding source. We record the rule, not the flag.
Agreement coverage from your side
If your institution has a read-and-publish deal, the fee may already be paid — many authors don't know. We surface it next to the price.
Comparison, letters, and languages
Side-by-side fees and waivers; ready negotiation letters prefilled for your journal (publishers grant discretionary waivers more often than authors ask); and each journal's primary language, because the researchers most exposed to APC barriers are served last by English-first tools.
What we are not: we don't rank journal quality, we don't advise where your work belongs scientifically, and we never invent a number to fill a gap.
Why libraries should care
Your help desk already answers our question — “how much is the APC and does our agreement cover it?” — daily. A maintained, dated, source-linked directory is something to link to instead of a spreadsheet to keep alone. Every release ships as CC BY / CC0 data with a datapackage and a citable DOI: use it in LibGuides, budget analysis, negotiation prep — no permission needed. Every value links to its source and its date, so you can hold us to our own standard; corrections from libraries are the mechanism the site runs on.