The Thompson Library & Archives Blog

Explore Open Access Publishing through the Library

Published on behalf of Matt Wolverton, Head of Collections and Technical Services.

Open access publishing has become a popular, if not trendy, movement in academic publishing. Ideally, open access publishing provides valuable content at no cost to readers, breaking down the paywall barriers that exist for individuals that don’t have access to academic resources through their institution. Research and writing could be more broadly disseminated potentially reaching a greater audience of individuals outside of the academy. However, in practice this has shifted the cost from the reader to the writer, and oftentimes these fees to publish, called Article Processing Charges or APCs, are costly.

Libraries have traditionally provided content for institutions of higher education. We subscribed to the print journals and bought the physical books. This transitioned to maintaining vast arrays of online journals and databases along with leasing and purchasing ebooks, if available to us. In the print world, we subscribed to individual journals. In the electronic world, we largely subscribe to “big deals”, large packages of journals offered by publishers at comparably high costs. The Thompson Library has “big deals”, maintained collaboratively with various libraries in Ann Arbor along with Dearborn), with Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, the American Chemical Society, Springer and others.

Increasingly, when these contracts renew we have been negotiating APC discounts and waivers for University of Michigan authors. A couple new and notable additions to our discount array are:

• American Chemical Society - University Library negotiated a Read  Green agreement with the American Chemical Society (ACS) which covers all three campuses.  This agreement allows University of Michigan authors publishing in ACS hybrid journals the option to deposit their accepted manuscript into a repository with no embargo and a Creative Commons license of their choice (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND). There is no fee for authors to participate in this program. 
• SpringerNature - The Big Ten Academic Alliance, of which the University of Michigan is a member, negotiated an agreement so that authors from all three campuses can now publish their articles open access in Springer hybrid journals at no cost. Articles accepted for publication between April 1, 2025 and December 31, 2026 are eligible. The agreement covers Springer and imprints including Adis, Birkhauser, and Palgrave Macmillan but does not include Nature journals (see title list PDF).

A full list of agreements available to the active UM-Flint community may be found on our Scholarly Publishing & Activity guide for Faculty. UM-Ann Arbor’s full list of agreements is available here: APC Discounts for U-M authors. Please be aware that not all of these agreements cover Flint.

To explore some of these options and learn about avoiding predatory journals and more, check out our upcoming webinar "Where Should I Publish My Article? Finding the Right Journal and Avoiding Predatory Journals & Conferences" on Friday, October 24 at noon. Register through Campus Connections.