Each year, the third week of October is designated as International Open Access (OA) Week. This year’s theme, The Cost of Knowledge, asks us to consider “the financial, human, and environmental costs of creating, sharing, and sustaining knowledge.” (For a recent discussion related to these costs, which included Pitt among the institutions studied, see Cantrell et al., “The system is obviously bonkers”: The APC Trap and the bind of scholarly publishing across four research intensive institutions in the U.S.)
One of the highest financial costs related to OA publishing is the article processing charge (APC), a fee publishers charge to make an article openly available upon acceptance and free to readers without subscriptions. HSLS, together with the University Library System, has negotiated and paid for many multiyear OA publishing agreements. These agreements enable eligible University of Pittsburgh authors to publish open access either at no charge to them or at a discounted APC.