Open Access Publication Fund (articles)

Gold Open Access

All articles in a gold open access journal are immediately available in open access. In many cases, an open access publication fee (article processing charge = APC) must be paid, see also https://open-access.network/en/information/glossar#c6220.

Hybrid Open Access

Unlike gold open access journals, not all articles in hybrid journals are available in open access. These journals are financed by subscriptions (i.e., they are subscribed to or licensed by institutions) and offer authors the option of making individual articles available in open access in return for a publication fee. If this option is not used, the article appears in closed access (= behind a paywall), see also https://open-access.network/en/information/glossar#c6213.

Green Open Access

According to the "green road" planned or already published research articles are published on a document server or repository. In the case of already published articles, this is referred to as parallel publication or secondary publication. The University of Bayreuth provides the Open Access repository EPub Bayreuth to make scientific articles available worldwide.

Diamond Open Access

The idea behind Diamond Open Access is that neither authors nor readers should incur any costs. Instead, the costs incurred are usually covered by public institutions (e.g., libraries), professional associations, or funding organizations, see also https://open-access.network/en/information/glossar#c6223.

„In the context of open access, the term transformation refers to the complete conversion of the scholarly publication system to open access, inter alia by converting traditional subscription journals into open access journals.“ (https://open-access.network/en/information/glossar#c6249). To achieve this goal, a growing number of publishers are offering so-called transformative agreements. These are sometimes also referred to as publish-and-read contracts. The best-known example in Germany are the DEAL contracts.

DEAL

• The five-year DEAL contracts (2024-2028) between MPDL Services gGmbH (since October 1, 2025: DEAL Open Access Services (DEAS) gGmbH) on behalf of the DEAL consortium and the publishers Wiley, Springer Nature und Elsevier have been in effect since January 1, 2024. The University of Bayreuth is participating in all three DEAL contracts
• In addition to read access, all three DEAL agreements also include a publishing component. The participation fees that UBT must pay are based purely on a publication-based billing system known as the paper charge model. This means that UBT is billed the contractually agreed publish-and-read fee (PAR fee) for each publication. It is irrelevant whether the authors opt for a gold or hybrid journal in the publication process. In the case of hybrid journals, the researchers' decision as to whether their article is published in open access or closed access (= opt-out) has no fiscal impact; the PAR fee is charged in either case.
• You can find more information about the DEAL contracts on our information page: https://www.ub.uni-bayreuth.de/en/digitale_bibliothek/e-journals/Projekt-DEAL/index.html

Other transformative agreements

• In addition to the DEAL agreements, UBT has also concluded transformation agreements with other scientific publishers. These agreements not only give UBT members online access to the journal portfolio of the publisher in question, but also enable researchers to publish journal articles in open access at none or reduced costs.
• Further information on the terms and conditions of the individual contracts and the associated workflows can be found here: https://www.ub.uni-bayreuth.de/en/digitale_bibliothek/open_access/oa_komponenten/index.html

Please be advised:

• Other fees that may be incurred in connection with a publication (e.g., submission fees, page charges, or color charges) are generally not eligible for funding.
• In addition to acknowledging possible funding from third-party sources, each funded article should also include a reference to funding from the UBT Open Access Publication Fund. Please refer to the information on our Funding Acknowledgements page.

Articles in Gold Open Access journals outside of DEAL

To apply for funding from the Open Access Publication Fund, please use our web form. Applications can also be submitted in advance of submitting an article.

To be eligible for funding from the Open Access Publication Fund, your article must meet the following criteria:

• as a member of the University of Bayreuth you are responsible for the payment of the publication fees as "submitting author" or "corresponding author".
• the article is published in a genuine open access journal which uses an approved quality control. References can be found at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• publications in journals (e.g. from MDPI) which are not (or no longer) included in the DOAJ cannot be funded via the Open Access Publication Fund (articles) (see Journals added to and withdrawn from DOAJ). For articles that appear in journals that are no longer listed in the DOAJ at the time of publication or invoicing of the article, the date of submission determines whether or not funding is possible.
• the publication is published as open access under a Creative Commons license (z.B. CC BY, CC BY-SA, ... see https://open-access.network/en/information/glossar#c6198) to enable legally secure reuse. The usage of the CC BY license is recommended.

Please proceed as follows with regard to the invoice:

• Please send the original invoice to: oa@uni-bayreuth.de.
• The invoice should be issued to you personally, with the address of the chair at the University of Bayreuth.
• If the publisher is from abroad please let the invoice be given to you zero-rated for VAT (without value added tax) as the tax is being paid from us directly. It is necessary that the VAT-ID is mentioned to the publisher and that it is enlisted on the invoice.
  The VAT-ID is: DE 811264317.

Articles in Gold Open Access journals inside of DEAL

When publishing in Gold Open Access journals under the DEAL agreements, it is not the researchers who receive the invoice, but the library on a quarterly basis. Any costs exceeding the funding amount (= APC including taxes and fees minus funding amount) are transferred by the University Library to a cost center specified by the chair after consultation with the chair. To this end, the Open Access Team will contact the submitting corresponding authors. You are welcome to inform the Open Access Team of your planned publication in advance using the web form.

Articles in Hybrid Open Access journals under transformative agreements

No prior application is necessary for publications in hybrid journals within DEAL or in other publishers with which the university has concluded a transformative agreement. If researchers are required to pay a contribution in these cases (see "What costs are incurred by researchers?"), the Open Access Team will contact the submitting corresponding authors.

Articles in Hybrid Open Access journals outside of transformative agreements

Publications in Hybrid Open Access journals outside of transformative agreements are generally not eligible for funding.

Articles in Gold Open Access journals (inside or outside of DEAL)

• Contributions to gold open access journals can be funded at a rate of €2,100 per article until further notice. Publication costs that exceed our funding must be borne by the publishers themselves.
• Attention: The journal Nature Communications also falls under this regulation and is not part of our transformative agreement with Springer Nature (Nature-branded Research Journals).

Articles in Hybrid Open Access journals inside of transformative agreements

• DEAL: In consultation with the university administration a concept was developed to cover the costs expected to be incurred by UBT for participation in the DEAL agreements. It was decided that, for publications in hybrid journals, the authors would contribute 10 percent of the respective publication costs. The remaining 90 percent will be funded centrally from the Open Access Publication Fund. In the case of hybrid journals, the researchers' decision as to whether their article is published in open access or closed access (= opt-out) has no fiscal impact; the PAR fee is charged in either case.
• Other transformative agreements: Depending on the respective contract terms, UBT researchers incur none or only reduced publication costs. You can find more detailed information on our information page: https://www.ub.uni-bayreuth.de/en/digitale_bibliothek/open_access/oa_komponenten/index.html

Articles in Hybrid Open Access journals outside of transformative agreements

Publications in Hybrid Open Access journals outside of transformative agreements are generally not eligible for funding. All costs must therefore be borne by the authors themselves.

If you would like to see which open access articles have already been funded by the Open Access Publication Fund in recent years, there are several options available to you. To increase the visibility of the articles, they are published in parallel by the University Library on the EPub Bayreuth publication and document server. This enables broader dissemination thanks to the integration of EPub Bayreuth into the international network of Open Archive Servers. The contents of the publication server can thus be searched via all central reference tools (OAIster, BASE, Google Scholar, etc.). The publications funded to date are available at EPub Bayreuth and are added to the publications list of the project „Open Access Publizieren“.

Depending on the platform, publication fees in OA journals can vary greatly and are subject to price increases. In the spirit of transparency in open science, the University of Bayreuth therefore wishes to disclose the costs of OA publications. To this end, the University Library is participating in “Open APC,” a subproject of the DFG-funded INTACT project. Each year the funded publications and their APC costs are reported to the open dataset in the GitHub repository “Datasets on fee-based Open Access publishing” (DOI, funding year, costs). The metadata of the publications is enriched in the Open APC project by data from CrossRef in order to create statistics and visualizations (e.g., graph of average APC costs). You can view the data in the GitHub-Repository openapc-de. The visualization can be found at: Open APC treemaps.

In case of further questions on Open Access please write an email to the Open-Access-Support-Team.