Publication costs, subsidies, and publishing agreements

The University of Regensburg supports its academics in electronic publishing with numerous services: https://www.uni-regensburg.de/bibliothek/elektronisches-publizieren/index.html. Under certain conditions, publication fees are also covered.

In order to make Regensburg's research results as visible as possible, the University participates in several publishing agreements which, in addition to read-only access, often also enable free or discounted open access. In addition to simpler communication, the advantage of publishing agreements is the centrally received and usually discounted invoices, which are checked by the specialised "Electronic Publishing" team for formal criteria and funding opportunities.

Irrespective of existing publishing agreements, publication fees in pure Open Access journals can be subsidised by the university's publication fund if the conditions below are met.

If you are not publishing directly in open access, please use the free self-archiving option!

The following conditions apply for a funding towards publication fees in pure (gold) OA journals as well as for the utilisation of publishing agreements:

1. Affiliation:
   A member of the University of Regensburg is identified in the publication as the (submitting or responsible) corresponding author and is responsible for paying the article processing charges. It must be evident in the work that the corresponding author's main work on this work was carried out at the University of Regensburg. In the case of affiliation with several scientific institutions, the main affiliation (the first affiliation), which indicates where the work was mainly produced, is decisive. Please always use the university e-mail address for clear assignment.
2. Publisher specifications:
   Specific information on the agreement can be found under "Open Access agreements with publishers". Depending on the publisher, only certain years, certain article types and certain journals may be affected by the agreement. The publisher usually informs authorized authors, but the publisher's information on a possible "free publication" should be verified by consulting the "Electronic Publishing" team or via the information shown here. In some cases, libraries must allocate the costs within the institution or charge them to the authors.
3. Procedure:
   At the moment, no separate application is required for the use of a publishing agreement or for the grant from the Publication Fund for articles in OA-only journals. The grant will be awarded to any article that falls under the conditions listed here, but only if the invoice gets directly sent to the library. The difference to the actual publication fee (incl. VAT) must be paid by the researchers. Researchers must inform the University Library promptly of the corresponding UR/UKR project/cost center, with which the University Library can settle. Cost splitting with other facilities is not anticipated. The article fee is paid by the University Library.
4. No funding:
   Fees for Open Access articles in "hybrid journals" (subscription journals) that are not covered by the free OA option under the publishing agreements, as well as additional costs for e.g. color charges, submission charges or page charges cannot be subsidized.
5. Additional requirements for a grant for publication fees in OA-only journals:
   (These grants are independent of an existing publishing agreement. The following conditions also apply to OA journals with which agreements exist, e.g. Springer-Nature and Wiley).
   • The articles to be published appear in journals whose articles are all accessible to users free of charge via the Internet immediately upon publication ("genuine open access journals") and apply recognized, strict quality assurance procedures in the respective subject. To ensure this, only fees for articles in open access journals that are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) can be accepted. We have compiled background information on scientific journals - quality criteria for you on this page.
   • A grant of €2000 per item will be provided in 2024/2025.
   • Goodwill rule:
     In order not to disadvantage researchers who cannot provide their own funds to pay publication fees, the entire publication fee can be covered on application. Young researchers in particular often lack the funds to publish in renowned open access journals. This makes this possible at any time and the publication venue can be chosen without financial hurdles. The application must be submitted in writing to the Department 3 Publication Services - Open Access of Department 5 of the University Library. If the University Library has not received an invoice or cancellation after 6 months, it will ask whether the application is still valid or whether it should be withdrawn (e.g. if the article is rejected). This is to prevent funds from being blocked unnecessarily. (Form for the application).

Open Access journals ("Gold OA journals", "Fully OA journals", "Pure OA journals")
In OA journals, publications are freely accessible as soon as they are published online and they are provided with a license (usually Creative Commons, see also legal information) for better subsequent use. Electronic publication without access restrictions of research results makes scientific information more visible, with the positive consequence that it is cited more frequently. The submission and quality assurance process (peer review) is similar to that of publishing in traditional journals. The costs incurred are often financed through author fees or article processing charges, which can (partially) be supported by the UR publication fund. Agreed discounts can be found in the tab "Open Access Agreements with Publishers", the requirements for a grant from the Publication Fund in the tab "Conditions".
In the Electronic Journals Library (EZB), Gold OA journals can be identified by the "indexed in DOAJ" button next to the green symbol.

Hybrid journals
These particular journals are based upon subscription which implies that they are only readable via subscription (shown in the EZB with a red or yellow symbol; if your library subscribes to the journal, you can access the articles accordingly) but also offer a paid OA option for individual articles. We do not cover these OA charges - as well as other charges, e.g. page charges, color charges, submission charges, etc. - in order to avoid double financing these articles or journals. However, due to special agreements, a free OA option is possible with certain publishers. These agreements can be found in the tab "Open Access agreements with publishers".
Conditions for using this free option: The corresponding author is a member of the University of Regensburg and UR/UKR is stated as their affiliation and correspondence address in the article! In case of affiliation to several scientific institutions, the first mention is crucial. The first author does not count. Publishers often also use the university e-mail address or the IP address of the university to check the authorization.

Through existing publishing agreements, UR members have the opportunity to publish certain article types in certain journals open access free of charge or for a discounted fee. For the assignment of manuscripts to UR, please refer to the “Conditions” tab above.
Where articles cannot be published free of charge, this also applies to articles from publishing agreements: Funding from the Publication Fund is possible for pure (in DOAJ-listed) OA journals up to €2000 (in 2025) if the “Conditions” above are met. In most cases, the invoice is sent directly to the university library, which automatically checks for eligibility. Any remaining costs will be transferred to a cost center of the corresponding author.
If you have any questions, you can contact us at any time!

Here is an overview of the contracts we have concluded with publishers and their terms and conditions: Publisher agreements

The Publication Fund of the University of Regensburg funds previously unpublished Open Access monographs and edited volumes (first publications) up to a certain maximum funding amount (pro rata). The conditions for this are

• Authors: Members of the UR who are responsible for paying the publication fees as authors (or editors in the case of edited volumes) are eligible to apply. In the case of several associated institutions, the main activity must take place at the UR and the work for this publication must have been carried out here. This must be clearly recognisable in the publication.
• Work: All components of the funded work must be permanently accessible to readers immediately upon publication, free of charge and worldwide, and must be reusable under a Creative Commons licence. Funding is available for scientific publications that appear under the Creative Commons licence CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. The Open Access version will be published at the same time as or before any parallel print version. The publication is clearly labelled as an Open Access publication on the publisher's website and in the print publication, is easy to find and can be cited via ISBN/DOI/URN. Adequate labelling includes free access and a free licence. The books must be subject to a professionally recognised quality assurance procedure. The quality criteria of the AG Universitätsverlage should be adhered to; certain points are mandatory. The publisher is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and/or lists its books in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) or on the OAPEN platform.
• Theses: Theses (including dissertations) are not funded. For these, we offer a cost-effective print and online publication option as part of the publications of the University Library.
• Costs: The costs must be listed transparently by the publisher. Only costs for open access publication - not for printing subsidies, colour charges etc. - can be covered. - can be covered. Funding commitments are valid for a period of 12 months. It is possible to combine the funding with other funds from the University of Regensburg.

All funded monographs and edited volumes are permanently archived in the repository of the University of Regensburg and made accessible online.
You can use the oa-finder to select suitable book publishers for your planned monograph.

For details on this, the possibility of funding or for specific questions, please contact the Open Access team (Email: oa@ur.de).

Scientific institutions and societies recommend the allocation of the free CC-BY (attribution) license so that works can be redistributed and reused in the best possible way. The NC (Non-Commercial)/ND (No-Derivatives) modules, on the other hand, mostly help the publishers, not the authors!
The restriction to non-commercial or no-derivatives is not recommended in most cases, as more restrictively licensed works are generally less likely to be reused due to user uncertainty and may exclude many - even desirable - reuse options (e.g. use by non-profit organizations, private educational institutions, general practitioners, freelance lecturers, blogs, free knowledge databases, commercial databases), see also https://de.creativecommons.net/faqs/#h.yun3vf9ta49j.
At the same time, however, many publishing contracts (e.g. also at Springer, Wiley, Elsevier, at least in 2024) stipulate that if NC/ND licenses are chosen, all rights of use for adaptations or commercial uses are transferred exclusively to the publisher! This offers publishers an additional opportunity to make money from their work without the authors themselves benefiting from it. In these cases, authors themselves must also obtain permission from the publisher if they wish to use their own works again for adaptations or commercial purposes. The NC module also does not protect against use by AI, as the transfer of rights to the publishers gives them the opportunity to resell your data exclusively. If the works are freely available anyway, this option is not as profitable.
See also https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/legal.html and https://deal-konsortium.de/warum-ccby..

Note: Prices quoted by publishers are always net prices, to which the 19% sales tax must still be added. According to the sales tax law, sales tax must be paid in the country of use. Therefore, please request a net invoice from publishers who are based abroad and quote our VAT ID DE 233 549 072 for this purpose. Upon payment of the invoice, the university will then automatically pay the 19% VAT to the German offices.

In accordance with the recommendations of the DFG, the German Council of Science and Humanities and the German Rectors' Conference, it was established for the University of Regensburg in a letter from the President Prof. Hebel ("Payment of publication fees", email 18.12.2020 to all faculties with the request for forwarding) that as of 2021 all publication charges of the UR and UKR, regardless of the type (page charges, color charges, open access publication charges or similar), must be directed centrally to the University Library starting in 2021, in order to uniformly record all charges for scientific literature supply, including publication charges, and thereby obtain a better basis for negotiation with publishers.
In this regard, we check each invoice to see if we can pay it from central funds. This is the case for publications in pure Open Access journals, if the conditions are met and funds are still available. We cannot centrally fund publication charges for articles in subscription-based journals, for example page/color charges. In this case, we must pass the bill on to you.
In addition, as of 1.1.2021, new requirements of the UR administration apply to incoming invoices of all kinds (see UniRegensburg circular of 17.11.2020 "Digitization of invoice processing and notes on electronic account assignment"). Here it is regulated that

• all electronically incoming invoices must also be electronically assigned
• incoming invoices must be sent by the invoice creator (i.e., the publisher!) as a PDF (not a download link) directly (for revision security reasons, no mails with forwarded content can be accepted!) to rechnung@ur.de (gladly with oa@ur.de in CC which you are free to contact in case of any other inquiries)
• the billing address must be: University of Regensburg (oa@ur.de) Central Invoice Receipt 93040 Regensburg
• for the allocation of publication invoices in the account assignment system, our email address oa@ur.de must be specified on the invoice (for example, as part of the billing address or in the "contact person" field).

When selecting suitable journals for your manuscript, you should first consider which journals you yourself are familiar with and in which good and thematically similar articles appear. There are also some platforms that can help you:

• DOAJ contains only pure, quality-checked OA journals. A listing in this database is a prerequisite for a publication grant at the UR (unless there is a corresponding publishing agreement so that the publication is actually free of charge). To search, enter the relevant keywords in the search field. Filter options: Subject, language, license, publisher, place of publication, peer review type, free publication.
• B!SON Journal Recommender recommends suitable DOAJ-listed journals after entering keywords/abstract.
• oa-finder shows suitable book publishers for planned monograph publications and suitable journals for planned article publications. Contains not only OA journals, but all journals in the Electronic Journals Library. With filter by subject, keywords, costs, OA type, publisher, language. Sortable by diamond/scholar-led/cost-free journals, APC level, CiteScore/SNIP/SJR (but not Journal Impact Factor). Including display of publication fees and whether cost coverage or free OA is possible due to the selected university! (Please note: cost coverage display is not always correct, e.g. for DEAL Gold journals).
• Manuscript Matcher by Web of Science helps you to find suitable journals on your topic (registration required).

You are welcome to ask us whether the journals you have in mind can be subsidized or whether they are covered by publishing agreements.
If you are not sure whether certain journals/publishers are reputable or can be classified as "predatory publisher", please ask us specifically!

For the verification of bibliometric key figures:
As some journals provide self-calculated key figures (“predatory publishers”), we recommend checking these on independent sites if necessary:

• SNIP
• CiteScore
• Scimago Journal & Country Rank: shows the SJR and H-index of journals. Filter: e.g. by subject, whether OA, whether listed in Web of Science
• Web of Science: InCites Journal Citation Reports: shows the journal impact factor of journals. This means that the IF specified by the journals themselves can also be checked. Filter: e.g. by subject and DOAJ listing. Access only in the campus network, via UB website: Database information system DBIS; Products: Journal Citation Reports

You know the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) as a service for using scientific journals on the internet. The EZB has now been expanded to include additional functions that provide researchers with targeted support when publishing:

• Contact information: Get direct contact to the publication service of our institution as well as information on invoice processing.
• Publication costs: Find out the average publication costs actually paid for journals from OpenAPC.
• Funding options: Find out about options for covering publication costs at the University of Regensburg.
• Journal categories: Filter journals based on categories in the EZB such as Diamond Open Access, DOAJ seal or Data Journal.
• Publishing information: Get journal-specific publishing details from the DOAJ, including information on:
  • Publication fees (Article Processing Charges)
  • Link to Submission Guidelines
  • Duration until publication
  • Information on the review process
  • License of publications
  • Accepted languages
• Information on secondary publication: Use important information on making your previously published research results available free of charge.

Please also note the UR publication guidelines. This describes, among other things, how the UR is to be indicated as an affiliation in your publication.