Some Open Access journals are financed through cost participation of the authors. These so-called Article Processing Charges (APC) are intended to secure the operations of the non-free journal and its profit revenue for commercial publishers, instead of the proceeds from subscriptions. The APCs are often between 1,000 and 3,000 euros per article. Some journals exempt authors from these costs, either on request or for certain author groups, for example, within the framework of the DEAL project. Also for the publication of books in Open Access, the costs are normally charged to the author, the so-called BPCs (book processing charges).

In third-party projects, you can apply for publication funds to finance Open Access costs. Furthermore many university and research organisations offer institutional publication funds, such as the Leibniz Association in Germany, which offers a publishing fund for articles in Open Access journals as well as for Open Access monographs. You can find an international overview of OA publication funds in the Open Access Directory. The network Radical Open Access offers a further overview of “Funding and publication opportunities for Open Access books”.