Open Access & Transformative Agreement Finder
This site helps Northwestern-affiliated authors on the Evanston and Chicago campuses find journals where Article Processing Charges (APCs) are waived or discounted through open access (OA) and transformative agreements (TA) negotiated by Northwestern University Libraries and the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). It lists over 6,000 journals and conference-proceedings series across 12 publishers, with the discount or waiver, the campuses covered, and the agreement's coverage dates for each title.
Considerations:
- The corresponding author must be affiliated with Northwestern University. Confirm eligibility and covered article types, follow each journal's submission guidelines, and use your Northwestern email address when submitting to avoid verification delays.
- If a journal is not listed, it may still be open access or covered by a separate agreement or departmental membership. Journal lists here come from each publisher's agreement title list and can change — if in doubt, use the publisher's own journal finder to confirm a specific title.
- When searching common terms in titles, the results list can be long. Try searching by eISSN for a direct match, or adjust 'Items per page' to see more titles at once.
See Open Access Publishing at Northwestern for full agreement details, or email scholarlycommunication@northwestern.edu with questions.
About the data
Each row is one journal (or conference-proceedings series) covered by an OA or transformative agreement. Rows are compiled from each publisher's official agreement journal list; agreement terms come from Open Access Publishing at Northwestern, the publishers' agreement pages, and the ESAC agreement registry. The columns:
- Journal Title — the journal or proceedings series covered by the agreement.
- eISSN — the journal's electronic ISSN, linking to its record on the ISSN portal (associated print ISSNs under “Identifiers”, journal website under “Links”). ACM conference-proceedings series are labeled conference proceedings instead, and a few titles have no registered eISSN.
- Publisher — the publisher whose agreement covers the title; use the filter above the table to limit results to specific publishers.
- Disciplines — used by the Filter by Discipline control above the table; there is no discipline column in the results. Subjects are derived from publication data, not assigned by publishers: each journal is described by the subject areas its articles fall into according to OpenAlex, and a subject is kept when it accounts for at least 10% of that journal's articles. ACM conference-proceedings series and Royal Society of Chemistry titles are classified at the publisher level, because OpenAlex does not describe them individually. Eight titles have no classification and appear only when no discipline is selected. Treat the subjects as a way to browse, not as an authoritative statement of a journal's scope.
- Discount or Waiver — what the agreement pays: “100% APC waiver” / “100% covered” means no APC is charged to the author; other values give the discounted price or per-license terms (e.g., ACS lists different rates by license type).
- Campuses Covered — which Northwestern campuses (Evanston, Chicago) are eligible under the agreement.
- Coverage Years — the agreement's active window. Eligibility usually depends on the acceptance or submission date falling inside this window — check the agreement page if a deal is near its end date.
- Agreement Info — links to the publisher's page describing the agreement, including eligible article types, workflow, and exclusions.
Coverage is not a guarantee of funding — some agreements have annual caps or article-type restrictions. Where a value could not be verified it is left blank.
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