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Open access publishing

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Your Open Access Choices

We understand that some researchers want to make their research easily available and downloadable beyond the academic community. To meet this need, we offer researchers a number of open access publishing choices. These include:

Open access journals

Elsevier publishes a number of Open Access journals. Articles published in these journals are freely available to anyone with an internet connection, and are hosted on our ScienceDirect platform. There are no subscription charges for these journals.

To support the costs associated with publishing, article processing fees apply. These cover costs including: managing the peer review process, supporting our publishing and hosting platforms, typesetting, marketing and other publishing costs. These are paid by the author (or their funding body or institution) after acceptance. The latest additions to our open access journal portfolio include:

Open access articles

Elsevier Journals with this open access option are established subscription titles which, after acceptance, offer the author an option to sponsor access for non-subscribers. If this option is taken, these articles become open access. As with open access journals, the article processing fee covers the costs associated with publishing including: managing the peer review process, supporting our publishing and hosting platforms, typesetting, marketing and other publishing costs. These costs are, after all, not covered by subscription charges for these articles [see our no double dipping policy].

More than 1,500 Elsevier journals now offer authors the option to sponsor open access to their articles. In addition, Elsevier has established agreements with funding bodies including the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council to allow authors funded by these bodies to be reimbursed for their open access publishing costs.


Open archives

Journals make archival content available open access to non-subscribers. The archives are opened after a period based on characteristics of the journal including subject area, usage patterns and frequency of publication. 74 Elsevier journals offer open archives. For example, all Cell Press articles are freely available after 12 months on the Cell Press website.

For more information on journals with open archives, please click here.


Manuscript posting

We recognise that some authors like to post their accepted manuscripts to their personal or institutional websites. Authors publishing in Elsevier journals may voluntarily do so.

If an author is required to post articles by a funder or employer, then Elsevier requires an agreement in advance with that organisation to ensure that manuscripts posting policies do not undermine the sustainability of the journal, and the manuscripts are made available after journal-specific embargo periods and with DOI links back to the published journal article.

For example, since 2005 Elsevier has had an arrangement with NIH under which Elsevier deposits accepted author manuscripts to PubMed Central for authors reporting research funded by the NIH. As a result, Elsevier has deposited more than 80,000 author manuscripts.

For further details, please visit our posting policy page.