Open Access (OA) refers to free, immediate, permanent, online access to digital full-text scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. There are limited copyright and licensing restrictions on open-access articles, meaning that anyone with Internet access may read, download, copy, and/or distribute them. A primary advantage to authors who make their articles openly accessible is that their research impact is maximized due to a wider audience. 

You can search for journals that don't charge fees through the Directory of Open Access Journals

Resources for WVU Faculty

WVU Open Access Agreements

WVU Library Support for Open Access 

• Open Library of Humanities
• A nonprofit, diamond open access publisher in the humanities and social sciences. Hosting 30 peer-reviewed academic journals (2024) funded by more than 340 libraries worldwide.
• Annual Reviews
  
• Through the OA model called Subscribe to Open (S20), Annual Reviews, existing institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals. With sufficient support, every new volume is immediately converted to OA under a Creative Commons license and is available for everyone to read and re-use.
• American Society for Microbiology
• In 2025, ASM adopted a Subscribe to Open subscription model for its six primary research, subscription-based journals. You can publish in any of these six journals without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). However these journals will continue to assess Page Charges and Supplemental Material Fees. WVU subscribes to; Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Infection and Immunity, Journal of Bacteriology, Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Journal of Virology. WVU authors will receive a discount on the page and supplemental material fee charges for those titles.   
• Project Muse 
• In 2025 Project Muse's Subscribe to Open efforts converted over 100 journals to Open Access. When you publish in any of those journals your work will be Open Access without paying an APC. 

Reduced Author Fees

The WVU Libraries have negotiated reduced fees if you publish your work in the following open access journals:

• BMC (formerly BioMed Central) and Springer Open
• 15% discount on the Article Processing Charge when publishing in BMC and Springer Open Journals
• MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)
• WVU authors receive a 10% discount on article processing charges
• The Royal Society 
• WVU author receive a 25% discount on article processing charges

Additional Resources and Information

Still not sure if Open Access is for you? Learn about:

• the three  types of open access for journal articles and
• about  your rights to your published works.

Other great resources for open access information include:

• Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) provides excellent information and resources about open access, including a printable copyright addendum you can send to your publisher to make sure you retain the rights to archive and share your own work.
• The  SHERPA/RoMEO database provides information about the self-archiving policies for a variety of journals. 
• The Directory of Open Access Journals provides a comprehensive directory of all open access scientific and scholarly journals in order to increase the visibility, ease of use, usage, and impact of these resources. 

Predatory Journals

Beware of journals seeking your contributions via unsolicited e-mails and then levying a fee for publication. These journals will not be listed in the  Directory of Open Access Journals and will not have signed on to the various open access initiatives. Other warning signs:

• Very short turn-around time for peer review; comments from the editors are general and do not address specific problems, improvements, and concerns.

• The author fee is too high or too low. The industry standard is $1,000 to $5,000

• There is no editorial board listed on the page, or the credentials of the board do not match the subject area of the journal.

• An international journal is more suspect.

• The publisher does not match the agency receiving the funds; the publisher’s name is generic or is very close to a well-known organization.

• The title is close to a well-known reputable journal. For example,  The Journal of Physical Education and Sports Medicine is very close to  The Journal of Physical Education and Sport Medicine.

Author Fund— Discontinued

The WVU Libraries are committed to providing open access to research for anyone anywhere. In recent years the library has begun engaging in new read and publish agreements that will now have to be the manner in which we contribute financially to helping campus authors publish openly. The Libraries encourage you to include publication fees in grant requests and use University funding, such as the Eberly College Subvention Fund whenever possible. From 2016-2023, we offered an Open Access Author Fund (OAAF) which has been retired. Please see the above resources to support your open access publishing.