The Penn Libraries has a 3-year agreement (2025-2027) with Elsevier Journals for Penn authors to publish articles open access with no article processing fees (APCs). Charges other than the APC may still apply, and are not covered by this agreement. Please refer to individual journal submission guidelines.
- This agreement covers open access publication in Elsevier's core hybrid journal collection. Please see our Author Services Guide for more information on the types of open access.
- The agreement does not include publishing in:
- Elsevier's gold journals
- Cell Press journals or the Lancet journals
- Articles must have a Penn-affiliated responsible corresponding author to be able to publish them in Elsevier journals without paying an article processing fee (APC).
- During the submission process, the authors must correctly identify they are affiliated with Penn to ensure they are matched to our agreement.
- CHOP researchers cross-affiliated with Penn are eligible under our agreements but MUST select UPenn (and not CHOP) as their affiliation when submitting articles.
- Eligible article types include primary research and review articles.
- In order to publish open access, authors will be asked to select a Creative Commons license for their article.
- By default Elsevier offers at least these 3 standard licenses: CC BY 4.0, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and CC BY-NC 4.0 but other options may be available depending on the journal. See Elsevier's site on open access licenses for more information.
- For more details on publishing open access and the author workflow please see Elsevier's Open Access Hub.
Please note that this agreement is not unlimited; there is cap on the number of articles that the Penn Libraries can publish in a given year. However, the cap is expected and intended to cover our publishing output based on our previous publishing data with Elsevier. If you have questions, please contact your subject librarian.
