Skip to Main Content

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, Springer, & Wiley Article Limits

As of September 2nd, 22% of the 2025 calendar year allocation of Open Access fee-waived articles remains for Elsevier. 29% of the 2025 calendar year allocation of Open Access fee-waived articles remains for Springer. 9% of the 2025 calendar year allocation of Open Access fee-waived articles remains for Wiley.

These agreements have a maximum number of articles per year that may be published as Open Access. 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 these limits 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.

Looking to publish an article as open access (OA)? Below are opportunities that provide funding to support those efforts:

To make sure you do not miss out on these opportunities, please identify your affiliation as Case Western Reserve University during the article submission phase. Using your case.edu email address serves as a secondary criterion to ensure the publisher's automation offers the OA funding opportunity to you. Using an affiliated email account (such as a hospital) or a free email account (such as Gmail) may cause the funding opportunity to be missed or slow down the approvals.

Note on OA Fund

Please note that CWRU does not have an open access fund to cover the cost of article processing charges (APCs) for journal articles or book processing charges (BPCs) or to cover the cost of authoring tools.

OA Funding Models

Libraries, researchers, publishers, funders, and others involved in open access publishing have been exploring different ways to fund scholarly publishing that allows content to be free to read while not charging author's OA publishing fees.

Here is a overview of some of those funding models:

  • Read and Publish Agreements: a model that combines library journal subscriptions and OA publishing costs. Libraries continue to subscribe to journal content and also cover the costs of OA publishing for their institution's authors. Many of the agreements listed here including with Wiley, Cambridge, Elsevier, and Springer Nature fall into this category. Also known as Transformative or Transitional Agreements.
  • Subscribe to Open (S2O): a model to convert closed (paywalled) journals to OA journals through subscriptions. Each year if enough libraries subscribe to a specific journal, the journal will publish all articles OA at no cost to authors regardless if the author's institution was one of the subscribers. If there are not enough subscriptions for that year, the journal will not publish articles OA, and all articles will be paywalled for that year. The Annual Reviews Agreement listed on this guide is one example of this model.
  • Diamond OA Journals: only publish OA articles but do not charge authors an Article Processing Charge or APC. Often these journals have outside funding or are supported by universities that pay staff salary and platform costs. At CWRU, we have several Diamond OA Journals including: Pathogens & Immunity, Engaged Management Review, Journal for Women and Gender Centers in Higher Education, and Discussions, among others. Find more Diamond Journals.