Open access publishing support
Like all publishing, open access (OA) publishing involves costs. Some publishers require that authors or institutions pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) or Book Processing Charges (BPCs) to cover their costs in making scholarly works OA. Others rely on financial support from libraries, universities, funding organizations, or scholarly communities to offer publishing that does not charge fees to the reader or the author.
The MIT Libraries helps pay for OA publishing, initiatives, and infrastructure in the following ways:
- Via “diamond” open access: We support journals and books that are free to read and have no author-facing fees
- Via publisher OA agreements: We sign agreements with publishers that pay for free or discounted OA journal publishing for MIT authors
- Via financial support to open scholarly infrastructure and initiatives around the world: We understand the importance of the infrastructure to an open, robust, and reproducible scholarly communications ecosystem and these components also have costs that should be funded
Diamond open access (no reader or author facing fees)
We fund the publishers and initiatives below to help them make articles, journals, and books free to read and free to publish in. Find more diamond OA journals and publishers in the Directory of Open Access Journals and Directory of Open Access Books.
Questions? Contact us
Publisher OA agreements
Libraries agreements cover full article processing charges for journals from the publishers below. The agreements are active as of the date the page was last updated. Questions? Contact us
December 2025 update: Due to budget cuts in the Libraries and Springer’s unreasonable pricing of OA publishing, as of January 1, 2026, we no longer have an agreement covering OA publishing charges for Springer & Palgrave journal articles.
Publisher discounts
The discounts below are active as of the date the page was last updated.
MIT Libraries funds for OA articles and books
Due to budget cuts in the Libraries, the open access articles fund was suspended starting July 1, 2025, and support for OA monographs is reduced. We are no longer accepting applications for individual OA monograph funds. As noted above, we still have publisher OA agreements that cover full or partial APCs.