APCs (Article Processing Charges) are publication fees that may be charged to the author or his/her institution for publishing in immediate open access. They cover services such as quality control, typesetting, editing and digital formatting.
As part of the negotiations conducted by the Couperin consortium, the USMB's Service Commun de la Documentation has taken out subscription licenses with a number of publishers, offering advantages for open access publishing through reduced or fully deductible APC fees.
| Publisher | Date of agreement | Type of agreement | Automatic cost reduction management | Documents to consult |
| EDP Sciences | 2022-2026 | Publish & read: Subscription + publication in open access without APC in CC-BY | YES: automatic management on the basis of the correspondence writer's affiliation address | List of journals included in the agreement with EDP |
| Wiley | 2022-2024 | Publish & read: subscription + open access publication without APC in CC-BY, CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND depending on the journal. | YES: via a form in the submission interface, with identification of the affiliation in a standardized list of establishments | List of journals included in the agreement with Wiley |
| Elsevier | 2019-2023 | A 25% discount on the public APC rate for hybrid and full open access journals (Freedom collection, BMF, Cell Press), with the exception of the following titles: Lancet, journals from the Cell Press collection and a range of journal titles from of learned societies. |
YES: Couperin centrally validates authors' affiliation to the Elsevier national license | List of Elsevier titles eligible for APC discount |
In coordination with the Couperin consortium,Université Savoie Mont Blanc has been conducting an annual survey of publication fee (PF) expenditure since 2017. The aim is to have concrete data on the reality of institutions' publication expenses, for greater transparency of scientific publishing costs.
The survey covers 2 types of expenditure:
- Publication fees not related to open access: submission fees, fees for additional pages, color figures, etc.
- Specific charges for open access publications, known as APC (Article Processing Charges).