Researcher Essentials

Read and Publish Agreements

What are they?

Read and Publish (R&P) agreements support open scholarly publishing in selected journals. These agreements negotiated through the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) enable SCU authors to publish open access papers without paying article processing charges (APC's).

The agreements are reviewed annually. Included journal titles may change from year to year, and throughout the agreement term. You will need to check the agreement details each time you submit a manuscript.

Read the CAUL fact sheet about Read & Publish Agreements..

What does this mean?

SCU corresponding authors will save money. Instead of paying APC's, the Library funds open access publication through its subscriptions.

IMPORTANT: The R&P agreements only cover open access publishing fees. As part of your journal selection process, always check submission guidelines and any possible costs such as page charges or any other fees on the journal's homepage prior to submitting your manuscript. These other additional publishing fees can be substantial.

How can I benefit from these agreements?

• You must be the corresponding author and use your SCU email address and affiliation
• Certain article types are excluded, including editorials, news and obituaries
• Your article must be accepted within the term of the agreement
• If you are a co-author, ensure the corresponding author is from an institution which also has a R&P agreement for your journal
• Depending on the publisher's process, you may need to nominate OA publishing at the time of submission or after peer peer review and  acceptance of your manuscript.

Capped agreements

The agreements with Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley are capped. The allowance is shared with all universities participating in the CAUL agreements not only SCU.

SCU authors can access the shared allowance with availability based on the order of article acceptance across all universities.

If an article is accepted for publication (to a hybrid journal) and the publisher’s cap has been reached, the author will be asked:

• to publish the article open access and therefore incur an article processing charge (APC), or
• to publish via subscription only access (i.e. behind a paywall) at no cost. 

The author should also then deposit their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in SCU's institutional repository, Cross Connect (Green Open Access).

For fully open access journals under a capped agreement, once the cap has been reached, the author will be directed to an author pays workflow, and the author will receive an invoice for the APC.

Check the progress of the publishers cap before submitting your manuscript. 

Choosing a licence

Authors need to choose a Creative Commons licence when publishing under a R&P Agreement. Conservative licences can limit research work and its impact. The more open the licence, e.g. CC BY, the easier it will be for your work to be accessed, read and used. Here is a quote from the Creative Commons website:

Researchers publish to be read, to have impact, and to make the world a better place. To accomplish these important goals, researchers need to enable reuse and adaptations of their research publications and data. They also need to be able to reuse and adapt the publications and data of others (Vézina, 2020, para. 4).

If you have an ARC or NHMRC grant, you may have requirements to open licence some or all of your research outputs. See this page for more information about CC licences.

Don't be afraid of open!

Read this article on the Open Access Australasia website to help you make an informed decision:

Open access licence choices: don't be afraid of open. By Richard White, Manager Copyright & Open Access at University of Otago Aotearoa New Zealand.