Creative Commons licenses play an important role in facilitating Gold Open Access publishing; the license that you choose will determine how readers can use your article. You may be required to select a Creative Commons license which complies with your funder or institutional mandates, for example research-funded authors may need to choose CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution License). You can find out more about Creative Commons licenses on our information page: click here.

You should have received an email from us informing you of your opportunity to publish open access under an open access agreement that we have with your institution. Some of these agreements will provide full coverage for open access, meaning that you can publish open access at no cost to you; you will not be asked for any payment information and will not be charged for the transaction. This information is only required if an APC is partially covered by your institution (e.g. a 20% APC discount); you will have to pay any remaining charges in order for your article to be published OA.

You can find out more about your institution's agreement and the support available to you by following the link in your email, or by using our elligibility checker.

Your institution has pre-paid for OA publishing as part of their Read and Publish agreement. Publishing OA under this agreement will not impose any additional cost to your library.

Eligibility is based on the corresponding author’s affiliation as it is printed on the article; this affiliation should reflect where the research was mostly conducted. If you are in doubt, we recommend that you first check with your library. Further FAQs relating to 'corresponding author' are available: click here.

Yes. Eligibility for funding under a Read & Publish deal is based solely on the affiliation of the corresponding author and the co-authors of a paper do not have to be based in the same place. Further FAQs relating to 'corresponding author' are available: click here.

If you have not yet completed an author publishing agreement, please follow the instructions in your acceptance email. Please do not sign and return the form above.

For most agreements, the deadline to convert your article to OA is the 31st March of the year after your article is published. So, for articles published in 2022, the eligibility window lasts until the 31st March 2023.

Final approval of your APC waiver is at the discretion of your institutional library and may be subject to their own funding checks if they hold a capped or token-limited agreement with us. Discover more about your institution’s agreement here.

We advise authors to check funder or institutional policies to ensure choices made during the publication process comply with relevant guidelines.