Open Access Publishing

Auraria Library supports the widest possible dissemination of the scholarly research and intellectual output of the three Auraria campus institutions. The term Open Access (OA) refers to scholarly research that is online and freely accessible. Open Access research does not require a subscription fee or payment to read, use, or cite it.

Open Access allows for greater access to researchers’ work and allows authors to retain rights to their publications. Publishing in non-OA subscription-based journals limits access to the academic institutions and libraries that can afford it. With declining library budgets, it is increasingly difficult to maintain access to subscription-based content. This means both the academic community and the public are at risk of losing access to this content.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

If you want to publish Open Access, many publishers will ask the author to pay an article processing charge (APC). The Auraria Library does not offer an Open Access fund to cover APCs but has negotiated APC discounts for Auraria Library affiliated authors (CU Denver, MSU Denver, CCD) when possible. To benefit from all agreement discounts, use your institutional email (CU Denver, MSU Denver, CCD) when submitting your work. If you are publishing in a journal that does not fall under one of our negotiated discounts, you should begin by asking the journal for a waiver or your own discount on the APC.

You can also consider writing APC costs directly into a grant. Please be aware that in August 2022, the OSTP at the White House issued a memorandum calling on federal agencies to make “articles resulting from all U.S. federally funded research freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.” All federal agencies were required to have a policy in place by December 31, 2025. Researchers should consult funding agencies about expectations.

* Auraria Library encourages authors to familiarize themselves with the terms regarding copyright and distribution rights before signing any publication agreement and to request a non‐exclusive distribution right for themselves when such rights are not specifically granted. When a publisher’s policies do not allow this, we recommend attempting negotiations with the publisher to allow deposit of pre- or post-print versions into the Library’s Auraria Institutional Repository. A preprint is a draft of the article before it undergoes peer-review. A post print is a draft after it has been reviewed.

Current Auraria Library Publishing Agreements
Publisher	Amount Covered	Description
Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)	100%	You can publish your article Open Access – at no cost to you – in ACM’s entire publication portfolio of journals, magazines, conference proceedings, newsletters, websites, and multimedia files. ACM books are excluded from the agreement
Cambridge University Press	100%	You can publish your article Open Access – at no cost to you – in gold and hybrid journals at Cambridge University Press.
The Company of Biologists	100%	You can publish your article Open Access – at no cost to you – in the journals Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open.
Elsevier	10% discount	You can publish your article Open Access – with a 10% discount – on article processing charges in gold or core hybrid journals with Elsevier.
IGI Global Scientific Publishing	5% discount	You can publish your article or book chapter Open Access – with a 5% discount – on article processing charges and chapter processing charges in all IGI journals and books.
MDPI	10%-15% discount	You can publish Open Access - with a 15% discount on article processing charges and with a 10% discount on Book Processing Charges - on all MPDI content.
Oxford Journals	10%-100%	You can publish your article Open Access – at no cost to you – in all hybrid journals at Oxford and – with a 10% discount - on article processing charges - in gold journals at Oxford.
PeerJ	100%	You can publish Open Access – at no cost to you – in all PeerJ journals.
Portland Press/Biochemical Society	100%	You can publish your article Open Access – at no cost to you – in any gold or hybrid journals at Portland Press/Biochemical Society.
Sage	10% discount	You can publish your article Open Access – with a 10% discount on article processing charges – in gold journals at SAGE.