APC payments no more? Read & Publish deals with publishers and the Scifree journal database
Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian, 23 Oct 2025
Since Nov 2024 we are offering the online Scifree database as the default tool for checking what journals are covered by any of the Read & Publish agreements that Strathclyde has with many publishers. At the time of writing (mid-Oct 2025) this Scifree database contains over 11,000 reputable titles where Strathclyde corresponding authors are able to publish their manuscripts Gold Open Access at no cost to them. Prior to the launch of Scifree we were offering lists of eligible titles per publisher, which made the task of identifying potential journals covered by these R&P deals quite time-consuming when published by different publishers. These lists are in fact still available in our (soon to be overhauled) 'Funding Open Access' website.
The reason why Gold Open Access is offered at no cost to Strathclyde corresponding authors having their manuscripts accepted in any of these journals is that the cost has been prepaid by the library. These so-called 'publish fees' have been calculated by publishers on the basis of the number of Strathclyde papers published in their journals in previous years. These upfront payments are very expensive – not only because there are publishers in which Strathclyde authors publish a lot, but also because there are many, many publishers out there. In fact, these prepayments are taking up a very sizable share of the institutional Open Access block grant (OABG) that the UKRI awards the University on an annual basis.
The main reason why universities in the UK and beyond have chosen this model is that these prepayments allow the democratisation of Open Access for all institutional authors funded or unfunded. When standalone APC payments were made from the UKRI OABG in the past, these would only apply to UKRI-funded manuscripts. This inevitably created a huge divide between (UKRI-)funded and unfunded authors, because only the first group were eligible for APC funding. The new Read & Publish model, while raising other challenges, applies equally to 'funded' and 'unfunded' authors as long as they are the corresponding authors on the manuscript.
One of the most pressing challenges this new model raises is that standalone APC payments are still being made for manuscripts accepted in fully Open Access titles not covered by these deals. Fully OA journals are those that require mandatory APC payments upon acceptance, and many publishers do not allow these to be included in the Read & Publish agreements or only at a massive cost, as this group of journals represent a very valuable additional cash cow for them. Springer Nature may well be the 'worst offender' in this sense, with dozens of fully Open Access journals (such as Scientific Reports, Nature Communications, the independent Communications series, the whole BioMed Central family and many other titles in whose webpages the publisher takes good care of prominently advertising aspects like the Impact Factor or the JCR quartile while completely hiding the APC price authors must pay upon acceptance – as all publishers typically do).
With most of the UKRI annual Open Access allocation invested in Read & Publish agreements, we are finding it very difficult to accept Open Access funding requests for very expensive standalone APCs in these fully Open Access journals with mandatory fees. This is particularly so in cases where there are perfectly suitable alternatives listed in the Scifree database where Strathclyde corresponding authors can publish Open Access for free.
This is a difficult argument to make over email, as it requires a rather lengthy explanation on the evolution in the ways the UKRI OABG is being invested. It's also difficult to raise awareness of the sheer existence of Scifree. Since it was launched almost a year ago, we have raised it every time there has been an Open Access presentation for a department or a research group. We have also undertaken a massive effort to disseminate it piecemeal to any Strathclyde author contacting the Open Access support via our OA mailbox. Despite all this, we are well aware that many Strathclyde authors may never have heard of Scifree yet, and this is the reason for this blog post.
We are well aware too that UKRI-funded researchers at Strathclyde are entitled to their APC funding and we don't want to be seen as telling anyone where to publish. However, at a time when savings targets are regularly being discussed throughout the institution, it's only natural that our advice should be "please do only submit to a journal with mandatory APCs if you absolutely cannot find any title in Scifree that would suit your manuscript". The result of authors not following this advice could well be the same APC funding freeze we were forced to apply in Q1 2025 due to the running out of the UKRI budget.
Note.- As of Nov 1st, 2025, an APC funding freeze has been introduced for UKRI-funded manuscripts accepted in fully Open Access titles with a mandatory Open Access publishing fee.