With increasing pressure from funding agencies and university leadership, there are growing numbers of researchers thinking about publishing in open access journals. For those thinking about this for the first time, it is perhaps a bit confusing. The following are the common choices that are available, depending on the journal.

No Fee Open Access

For quite a few smaller Open Access journals run by a small group of researchers, particularly those designed for a specfic niche, all of the work inn producing the journal is done by volunteers (effectively) and other costs (such as a publishing system) are covered by a university (either implicitely or explicitly). In these cases, there is no fee charged to an author for publishing an article. It is likely that these journals operate on a "bare bones" philosophy, not offering the services that would normally be offerred by larger operations (e.g. proofreading, formatting, broad indexing...)

Author Fees

For more commercially oriented journals or for those that are too large to be run entirely by a small number of volunteers, then there are expenses that must be paid and these are covered by charging authors for articles that are accepted for publication. The range of fees charged is very wide, ranging from 1000 SEK to 25000 SEK.

These fees are often acceptable expenses from research grants. Also, some universities (can we list the Swedish ones) have set up a fund that will pay some or all of these Open Access publishing fees. Often these funds are administered through university libraries (is this true in Swedish universities?)

Hybrid Model

Most of the large subscription publishers also offer an Open Access option. Authors can choose to pay a fee to the publisher and their article will be freely available (while other articles in the same journal will only be available to those who have a subscription). Fees for this option also vary very widely, running from 5000 SEK to 25000 SEK. Again these fees are usually acceptable expenses for research funds and in some cases can be recovered from central university funds.

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