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CWRU Open Access Agreements and Other Funding

CWRU authors are able to publish open access at no cost in select journals through agreements with several publishers. This guide provides details on each agreement for CWRU authors as well as alternative no cost options and funding possibilities..

Elsevier Article Limit

As of September 2nd, 22% of the 2025 calendar year allocation of Open Access fee-waived articles remains for Elsevier.

Our Elsevier deal has a maximum number of articles per year that may be published as Open Access under this agreement. When the 2025 calendar year limit is reached, corresponding authors will no longer see the option to publish Open Access at no charge during their article publishing process. Corresponding authors have two options: 1) they can choose to publish Open Access on their own and pay the APC, or 2) they can choose to publish the article under the traditional subscription access model at no charge, then submit the Accepted [peer reviewed] manuscript version to CWRU's open access repository, Scholarly Commons. For more information on submitting to Scholarly Commons, contact scholarlycomm@case.edu.

Last year, we reached this limit by October and expect to reach it again by then or sooner. If you are submitting a manuscript, please note that the acceptance date determines your eligibility, so articles accepted after we reach the limit will not be covered by the agreement.

OhioLINK has negotiated an upgraded agreement that offers open access (OA) publishing benefits. CWRU Authors can publish OA in most of Elsevier’s hybrid journals at no additional cost to either the author or the institution. This means that CWRU authors can publish an article as open access without paying any Article Publication Charge (APC).

To be eligible:

  • Article must be accepted for publication between January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2027
  • Must be published in an eligible journal. Only select hybrid* journals are eligible for OA fee coverage (see list link below)
    • Does not include Cell Press and Lancet titles
    • *subscription journals that publish subscription, paywalled articles and OA articles that require paying an APC. Does not include journals that publish only OA articles.
  • The submitting corresponding author must be affiliated with CWRU at the time of article acceptance

Note: There is a statewide article limit each calendar year (Jan-Dec). Once we reached the article limit for a given year, we can no longer offer OA APC coverage. This is a first-come-first-serve opportunity. In 2024, we reached our article cap limit for Elsevier in October.

If your article meets the eligibility criteria, the publisher's system will offer the no-cost OA publishing option at acceptance. Learn more about this process below.

Elsevier OA Publishing Process

From Elsevier: "The process of publishing under the agreement is straightforward:

  • Step 1 – Once the journal accepts your article, you will receive an email containing a link to the “post acceptance author journey”.

  • Step 2 – You will be asked to review your affiliation and funder details. Based on this information, you will see personalised publishing options including the option to publish under the agreement.

  • Step 3 – You will confirm your publishing choices and complete the post acceptance journey.

  • Step 4 – Your institution will validate your eligibility for the agreement

  • Step 5 – You and your co-authors will receive an email to confirm that the APC discount will be applied.

During the submission process, the system will present you with personalised publishing options including any agreement or offer that you may be eligible for. You can indicate your publishing choice during submission, but you are not required to finalize your choice until after acceptance. There is a maximum number of articles that may be published as open access under this agreement. If the limit is reached, authors will no longer see the option to publish as open access under this agreement."