Elsevier offers the option for authors to sponsor access to individual articles through hundreds of individual journals and via arrangements with funding bodies. These options enable authors to decide how their articles are published and to comply with the requirements of institutions, governments and funding bodies.

Journals offering sponsored access

A number of journals published by Elsevier offer authors the option to sponsor non-subscriber access to individual articles. The charge for article sponsorship is $3,000. This charge is necessary to offset publishing costs – from managing article submission and peer review, to typesetting, tagging and indexing of articles, hosting articles on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs to ensure global dissemination via ScienceDirect, and permanently preserving the published journal article. The fee excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges which are additional.

Authors can only select this option after receiving notification that their article has been accepted for publication. This prevents a potential conflict of interest where a journal would have a financial incentive to accept an article. For further information on how we implement this policy, please read our No Double Dipping Policy. This includes details of journals in which articles were sponsored in 2011, details of journals with articles sponsored in 2010 are also available.

Authors who have had their article accepted and who wish to sponsor their article to make it available to non-subscribers should complete and submit the order form.

Sponsored Articles have a specific set of user rights - for more information, please   follow this link.

Funding body arrangements

Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with manuscript archiving requirements of the following funding bodies, as specified as conditions of researcher grant awards.

These agreements and policies enable authors to comply with their funding body’s archiving policy without having to violate their publishing agreements with Elsevier. The agreements and policies are intended to support the needs of Elsevier authors, editors and society publishing partners, and to protect the quality and integrity of the peer-review process. They are examples of Elsevier’s ongoing engagement with scientific and academic communities to explore ways to deliver demonstrable and sustainable benefits for the research communities we serve.

Elsevier has a track record of working on behalf of our authors to ensure that authors can always publish in Elsevier journals and still comply with archiving conditions defined in research grant awards. For information on specific funding bodies, please see the funding body information page.

The charge for article sponsorship is typically $3,000. This charge is necessary to offset publishing costs – from managing article submission and peer review, to typesetting, tagging and indexing of articles, hosting articles on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs to ensure global dissemination via ScienceDirect, and permanently preserving the published journal article. The fee excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges which are additional.

Elsevier’s policy is not to charge subscribers for sponsored content and when setting journal list prices only to take into account content published under the subscription model.

Because the uptake of sponsored articles since 2006 has been very low it has not had a discernible impact on Elsevier’s journal subscription list prices.  In 2011, 959 Elsevier articles were sponsored and published. An additional 93 articles were also sponsored which were published prior to 2011.

Sponsorship revenues from these articles amounted to less than 0.1% of Elsevier’s total revenues.

We will continue to provide further information on the uptake of sponsored articles over time. For a more full discussion of factors influencing journal pricing, see   http://elsevier.com/wps/find/journalpricing.cws_home/journal_pricing.