CWRU Open Access Agreements and Other Funding

As part of CWRU Libraries support of open access (OA) and open scholarship on campus, we are making it easier for our authors to participate in open publishing by removing financial barriers through OA Agreements with select publishers. Often to publish openly, authors have to pay fees called article processing charges (APCs).

These agreements though allow CWRU authors to publish open access without paying an APC. Through OhioLINK, CWRU has agreements to cover APCs in select journals from Cambridge, Elsevier, IOP, Springer Nature, and Wiley. CWRU has also entered into similar agreements with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Royal Society of Chemistry to cover APCs for CWRU authors. Additionally, CWRU Libraries provide support for OA publishers like Annual Reviews and punctum books, which have community subscription models that allow all authors to publish OA freely.

See the publisher pages on this Guide for more detailed information on each agreement.

All current CWRU faculty, staff, students, and researchers are eligible for APC coverage under our agreements, if they are the corresponding author, list CWRU as their primary affiliation at submission, and are affiliated with CWRU at the time of article acceptance. Alumni are not eligible under our agreements. We recommend using your CWRU email (e.g. kxc835@case.edu) to help verify affiliation with CWRU.

No, some publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc.) do not include all their journals in our agreements. Check the publishers page on this Guide for lists of journals eligible under our agreement with that publisher.

Yes, our agreements with Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley all have article limits. Once we reach the article limit for a given calendar year (Jan-Dec), we can no longer offer OA APC* coverage. These agreements are a first-come-first-serve opportunity.

In 2024, we reached our article cap limit for Springer in September; and our limits for Elsevier and Wiley in October. As we get close to our limits, we will put banners on each the publishers page on this Guide providing more information on how close we are to reaching that limit.

Springer does not include any Nature portfolio journals including Nature itself and Scientific American in their OA agreements with institutions, so it is not covered under our agreement. Springer does provide a list of eligible journals that are included on their website, if you are interested.

However, there are still a few options that you might look into to help cover these costs. One is to see if your department or your funder (if applicable) has funds to cover the OA fees in these journals.

CWRU Libraries pursues and considers OA publishing agreements that provide our community with access to open publications and opportunities to publish open access and that align with our principles.

Those principles include:

• Promoting Openness. We promote and advocate for open and equitable sharing of scholarly outputs and prefer opportunities that advance open-access publishing for all authors.
• Preservation and Accessibility. We strive for long-term, equitable access to publications. We prioritize agreements that ensure long-term digital preservation of content and include model accessibility language. 
• Rights Retention. We encourage authors to retain rights to their publications and prioritize agreements that allow authors to retain ownership over their publications and to openly share and reuse their publications.
• Transparency. We value being transparent with our community both within and outside CWRU. To the best of our ability, we will share information on agreements and the decision-making processes with our community. We will encourage and work with publishers and partners to remove non-disclosure language and share our agreement terms publicly.

When evaluating agreements, we consider criteria such as:

• Publisher's commitment to best practices and standards, such as the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing developed by DOAJ, COPE, OASPA, and WAME
• Authors retain copyright in their publications published under an open access license
• Publisher uses Creative Commons licensing, ideally with the lowest level of restrictions on reuse e.g. CC-BY
• Publisher adheres to library and university standards for discoverability, accessibility, and digital preservation
• Publisher should demonstrate a commitment to OA (i.e. roadmap to OA available, how much is currently OA, fiscal sustainability, etc.)
• Publisher supports Open Science Practices ( i.e. ORCID, open data, open protocols, software, etc.)
• Publisher complies with most current COUNTER COP for gathering usage statistics
• Publisher is transparent with their agreements with other institutions