Open Access publishing provides free and unlimited online access to scientific literature and scholarly information.

Open Access publishing requires an Article Processing Charge (APC) to cover the costs of publishing an article in an OA journal (i.e. editorial costs for peer review, editorial processing, access, archiving, and infrastructure).

The APC fee is paid by the author or the author's department (university or research organization), most often from project funds.

The amount of this fee varies from journal/publisher to journal, taking into account the different costs and prestige of the journal. The average cost is 2500 €. The specific amount of the APC fee should be transparent and searchable on the publisher's website.

Within the framework of the concluded transformation contracts (via CzechELib), a limited number of tokens are available for payment of APC fees (number of free tokens/total number of tokens) in 2025 for some publishers: 

Springer Nature: 5/9 tokens (update to 7.4.2025)
Wiley: 8/10 tokens (update to 25.3.2025)
Taylor & Francis: 3/6 tokens (update to 25.3.2025)
Emerald Publishing (col. Engineering): 1 token
ACM: unlimited tokens
Cambridge University Press: unlimited tokens
Sage: 20% discount on Gold OA titles, 90% discount on hybrid titles (200 GBP/APC)

Instructions for authors can be found on the website of the CzechELib National Centre. You can also find an informative list of journals with free/discounted OA publishing.

Tokens are allocated according to the "First come first served" rule.

For communication with publishers it is necessary to indicate the affiliation to UWB, i.e. use e-mail with the domain @zcu.cz.

We recommend using tokens only if APC funding from other sources is not available.

1 token = 1 paid APC fee per article (no additional costs for UWB).

Contact e-mail: openaccess@uk.zcu.cz