Open Access Publishing Deals

IU Indianapolis authors (including the IU School of Medicine) have access to a growing number of for-fee open access publishing discounts and deals. Sometimes these opportunities reflect agreements made by the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) on behalf of Indiana University.

The IU Indy libraries (Ruth Lilly Medical Library, Ruth Lilly Law Library, IU School of Dentistry Library, and University Library) have also purchased a few OA publishing memberships or “transformative” publishing deals independent of the BTAA.

The following discounts and deals are available to IU Indianapolis authors:

American Chemical Society

IU Indianapolis corresponding authors who opt-in when submitting to IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks and/or PMC with no embargo and no fees.

Discounted prices for optional, but full open access of the final published version are also available.

Association for Computing Machinery

ACM journals, conference proceedings or the International Conference Proceeding Series (ICPS) are covered under this agreement. An IU Indianapolis author must:

  • be listed as the corresponding author
  • use their institutional email address when submitting their work

Some exceptions do apply.

Cambridge UP

BTAA agreement: Original research (research articles, review articles, rapid communications, brief reports and case reports) by corresponding authors from IU Indianapolis accepted for publication after January 1, 2024.

BTAA Wiley

  • For Wiley’s hybrid OA journals, authors should carefully consider the average time to publication to try to ensure the article is accepted and the author agreement completed by the December 31, 2027 deadline.
  • For Wiley’s gold OA journals, articles must be submitted for publication by Monday, August 31, 2026 to be covered by this agreement. After that date authors will need to support APCs from other sources.

The Company of Biologists' Read & Publish License

  • Eligibility: IU Indianapolis affiliated corresponding authors.
  • Five journals covered: Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms, Biology Open.

MDPI Institutional Open Access Program

  • Journals covered: all MDPI journals (e.g., Cancers, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Sensors, Nutrients, Genes, …)
  • Level of support: In an agreement made with University Library, MDPI (a fully open access publisher) provides all IU Indy authors with a 10% discount.

SpringerNature (Hybrid Journals)

The Big Ten Academic Alliance have reached a two-year agreement with SpringerNature, for unlimited publishing in Springer hybrid publications. This agreement runs from April 1, 2025 through March 31, 2027. Under this agreement, Indiana University Indianapolis authors can publish open access at no charge in hybrid journals under the Springer, Adis, and Palgrave Macmillan imprints as well as academic journals on nature.com and several smaller imprints, but not Nature or any of the Nature-branded titles.

The deal covers Original Papers, Review Papers, Brief Communications, and Continuing Education articles, which are published under a Creative Commons license at no extra charge to the institution or author.

You must identify yourself as affiliated with Indiana University Indianapolis or the IU School of Medicine and use your institutional email address as part of the publishing workflow. You must be the corresponding author for the article to be eligible.

Please note, publishers often confuse IU Bloomington with the larger system of Indiana University. Agreements made on behalf of IUB faculty are not available to IU Indy faculty unless listed above.

Other Paths to Open Access

Open access publishing does not always depend on publishing fees. In fact, most open access journals are subsidized by universities and scholarly societies with no fees levied on authors or readers. Nearly 65% of the more than 21,000 journals in a broad range of disciplines indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) charge no fees to authors.

If you can not find a suitable, no-fee journal in the DOAJ, the IU Indianapolis Open Access policy gives you the rights to make the accepted manuscript of any article that you (co)authored while employed as a faculty member at IU Indy openly accessible in the institutional repository, IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks. The IU Indy Open Access policy applies to all scholarly articles authored by IU Indy faculty since 2015 and does not require the payment of article processing charges.

However, if the journal that best suits your article is a for-fee, open access journal that is indexed in the DOAJ, and you do not have access to funds to cover the fee, before pulling the submission, you might try the following:

  • Ask the publisher for a fee waiver or discount.
  • Ask your scholarly society if they have membership programs or related discounts with the publisher.
  • Consult with your coauthors to see if their schools or universities have access to funds or other deals to support the cost of publication.