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Open Access Publishing

Open Access (OA) is a publishing model that makes scholarly publishing available online to readers for free, allowing for the full text to be read, downloaded or shared online without financial, legal, or technical barriers.

To support open access publishing, Northwestern Libraries

  • sign read and publish agreements with publishers that waive article processing fees
  • support open access infrastructure and initiatives

To learn more, reach out to library@northwestern.edu.

Publisher agreements

Agreements with the following publishers allows eligible articles to be published open access. Unless noted below, for all agreements

  • the corresponding author must be affiliated with Northwestern University
  • article processing charges (APCs) will be waived for corresponding Northwestern authors
  • Northwestern authors retain rights to their work
Read and publish agreements by publisher
Publisher Journals included Journals excepted Effective dates for current agreement
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) All ACM conferences, journals, and magazines, for which ACM manages production and rights, are eligible for Open Access publishing January 1, 2024 - January 1, 2027
Cambridge University Press
All Gold Open Access titles except those noted in this table
  • Africa Bibliography
  • Annales: Histoire
  • Sciences Sociales
  • Annales: Histoire
  • Sciences Sociales (English edition)
  • Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  • PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
  • New Surveys in the Classics
January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2026
Cogitatio Press
  • Media and Communication
  • Ocean and Society
  • Politics and Governance
  • Social Inclusion
  • Urban Planning
January 1, 2023 - December 31, 2025
Company of Biologists
  • Development
  • Journal of Cell Science
  • Journal of Experimental Biology
  • Disease Models & Mechanisms
  • Biology Open
January 1, 2023 - Ongoing
IOP ScienceXtra Use IOP Publishing journal search tool January 1, 2023 - December 31, 2025
Microbiology Society
  • Microbiology
  • Journal of General Virology
  • Journal of Medical Microbiology
  • International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology
  • Microbial Genomics
  • Access Microbiology
January 2023 - December 2025
Royal Society of Chemistry All hybrid and gold open access portfolio journals RSC Advances January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2026
Wiley All fully open access or hybrid journals January 1, 2023 - January 1, 2026

Open publishing initiatives

Northwestern Libraries supports open access publishing by using its resources and memberships in academic alliances, such as the Big Ten Academic Alliance, to support the following initiatives:

  • arXiv: Northwestern Libraries supports arXiv, a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
  • Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): Northwestern Libraries supports DOAB, a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access (OA) books and open access book publishers.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Northwestern Libraries supports DOAJ, a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
  • Open Library of Humanities: Northwestern Libraries supports OLH to publish peer-reviewed open scholarship in humanities topics.
  • SCOAP3: Northwestern Libraries supports SCOAP3 (the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) to offer open access publishing opportunities for journals related to high-energy physics.
  • University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission: Northwestern Libraries supports U-M Press' Fund to Mission, a publishing model transitioning at least 75% of U-M Press monographs published annually to open access.

Questions?

Contact library@northwestern.edu or your subject librarian to discuss opportunities to publish open access in your field.