THE CHALLENGE

The scholarly communications landscape is changing. Authors can publish their articles in subscription or open access journals. When publishing in open access journals, the author has to pay for Article Processing Charges (APCs).  

In many developing countries, universities, research institutions and national research funding agencies do not have budgets to cover APCs and authors have to pay from their own pockets. 

To address this issue, the EIFL Licensing Programme negotiates with publishers for free or discounted APCs on behalf of authors from EIFL partner countries. Many publishers have their own waivers and discount schemes that are advertised on their websites; however these could be withdrawn or changed at any time. Therefore EIFL secures  waivers and discounts for authors by signing multi-year agreements with publishers. 

EIFL agreements with publishers aim to cover publishing in fully open access journals (which only include open access articles) and, during the period of transition to open access, also hybrid journals (which include a mix of open access and closed-access articles that can only be read by people who have subscriptions). 

• EIFL’s principles for negotiating open access agreements with publishers.
• The benefits of EIFL's APC agreements:  
  • Interview with Dr Imad Ibrik, Research Director, An-Najah National University, Palestine (EIFL Annual Report 2019).
  • Interview with Tatjana Timotijevic, head of the department of Scientific Information at the National Library of Serbia, and EIFL Country Coordinator in Serbia (EIFL Annual Report 2020).
  • Interview with Aušra Vaškevičienė, EIFL Licensing Coordinator in Lithuania and Administrator of the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium (EIFL Annual Report 2021).
  • Interview with Karmen Štular Sotošek, EIFL’s Country Coordinator in Slovenia and Executive Director of the library consortium, COSEC (EIFL Annual Report 2022).