Go back
“Yes” to Transparent Service Fees, “No” to Fees That Charge Authors to Exercise Their Rights
22/10/2025
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) have introduced new fees targeting authors who exercise their right to self-archive accepted manuscripts under a CC BY license. cOAlition S opposes these charges because they penalize authors for complying with open access policies.
This blog post by Bodo Stern (Chief of Strategic Initiatives at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and Rachel Bruce (Head of Open Research Strategy, UK Research and Innovation) proposes an alternative: replace these rights-infringing fees with a transparent, service-based model. Would such a fee-for-service model for appraisal services be a better way forward?
Let’s open the conversation.
Earlier this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) introduced a new Repository License Fee, which charges authors for practicing a form of ‘green’ open access by self-archiving their author accepted manuscripts with an open license (CC BY). In 2023, the American Chemical Society (ACS) implemented a similar charge called the Article Development Charge. Both fees purport to offer an alternative compliance path for authors whose funders require open access under a CC BY license. The traditional path – ‘gold’ open access – requires authors to pay an article processing charge (APC) for open access publication in the journal.
ACS and IEEE justify these new charges as covering what ACS calls “pre-acceptance services”, which include managing peer review, supporting manuscript development, and performing other quality checks. Below, we use a more neutral term, appraisal services, which implies neither endorsement nor curation.
The new fees are a response to a growing reality: funders and institutions that promote open access are emphasizing authors’ rights to share their accepted manuscripts openly and immediately on repositories. The cOAlition S rights retention strategy, for example, secures the rights of cOAlition S-funded authors to self-archive manuscripts under a CC BY license in designated repositories to comply with the open access policy of cOAlition S, Plan S. Since repository deposition is cost-free for authors, they can, in principle, fulfill open access mandates without paying APCs. Faced with this shift, it seems ACS and IEEE have decided that if they can’t stop authors from legally sharing manuscripts, they can at least charge them for doing so.
These fees are not structured to cover a legitimate service—they are a penalty for authors who intend to exercise a right they already have.
Others have already laid out why these fees are problematic and why funders and institutions are unlikely to cover them (see cOAlition S blog and COAR blog). In essence, the issue is simple: these fees are not structured to cover a legitimate service—they are a penalty for authors who intend to exercise a right they already have.
Turning a Bad Idea into a Good One
Treating an author’s inherent right as a billable item is a missed opportunity. A thoughtfully designed and transparent fee-for-service model for appraisal services could offer a viable and even innovative alternative—provided it is applied equitably rather than selectively and does not seek to exploit rights authors already possess.
Let’s take peer review as an example. Both ACS and IEEE cite it as an undercompensated service when authors choose to post an author accepted manuscript with a CC BY license. If peer review were offered as a standalone appraisal service, it could be funded in a more principled and inclusive way that does not interfere with green open access. But for this to work, every author who uses the service must be treated equally—fees cannot be selectively applied only to those who later choose to deposit their manuscripts in repositories.
A fee-for-service model also demands accountability. Pointing to an author accepted manuscript or a version of record as evidence of peer review is insufficient—these are indirect and often opaque markers of the process. Instead, the actual outputs of peer review—the reviewer reports and author responses—should serve as the public record of the service provided. These documents offer the most direct evidence of both the labor involved and the scholarly value added.
Not all appraisal services demand this level of transparency. For example, feedback and assessments that take place before a manuscript’s public debut—say, before it appears on a preprint server—can reasonably remain confidential. But organized peer review occupies a distinct role: it surfaces scholarly discourse around an article—including critical commentary and divergent views—which are part of the intellectual scaffolding that supports further inquiry. To support cumulative, transparent scholarship, peer review should be visible and citable, alongside the work it evaluates.
A fee-for-service model would enable journals to receive fair compensation for appraisal services while allowing authors to meet open access mandates through self-archiving on repositories.
A fee-for-service model offers a practical solution to the long-standing tension between green open access and traditional journal economics. It enables journals to receive fair compensation for appraisal services—such as coordinating peer review—while allowing authors to meet open access mandates through self-archiving on repositories.
Who Should Pay?
This fee-for-service model disentangles two core functions that current business models conflate: author-facing appraisal and reader-facing curation. Because appraisal is initiated by authors, it is reasonable for them or their institutions to cover its cost, while readers fund curation, for example through subscription paywalls. This arrangement improves on today’s APCs and paywalls in several ways: Appraisal fees, tied to service execution rather than manuscript acceptance, would be lower and less conflict-prone than APCs. APCs are inflated because accepted authors cross-subsidize rejected submissions, and they are conflict-prone since authors pay for a selective endorsement in which they have a vested interest. Meanwhile, paywalls in this model would apply only to journal content, while green open access ensures that peer-reviewed research remains freely available in repositories.
Nonetheless, any system in which authors or readers bear direct costs risks perpetuating inequities—whether by imposing pay-to-play barriers on underfunded researchers or restricting reader access to curated content. Moving toward collective or institutional funding could mitigate these risks while sustaining both fairness and openness in appraisal and curation.
We must say ‘no’ to opportunistic fees that penalize authors for asserting their rights—and ‘yes’ to fair, transparent, and verifiable service fees
To accelerate the shift to full and equitable open access, we must say ‘no’ to opportunistic fees that penalize authors for asserting their rights—and ‘yes’ to fair, transparent, and verifiable service fees that reflect the real value publishers provide.
Related articles
Bodo Stern
Bodo Stern is the Chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). He works directly with HHMI’s president and senior executive team to formulate and execute the organization’s strategic initiatives and direction, with emphasis on enhancing HHMI’s investment in research and science education. Bodo is also responsible for the Institute’s philanthropic collaborations to advance science. He previously served as HHMI’s chief development and strategy officer.
Before joining HHMI, Bodo served for eight years as director of research affairs at the Harvard Center for Systems Biology, where he helped to manage the Bauer Fellows Program, a unique initiative that gives young scientists the opportunity to run independent research groups. He also has worked as a senior scientific editor at Cell.
Bodo earned a PhD in biochemistry from University College, London, and an MA in biochemistry from the University of Tübingen, in Germany. His primary research explored how cells correct chromosome errors during cell division.
View all posts by
Bodo Stern
Rachel Bruce
Rachel Bruce is Head of Open Research Strategy at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). She works directly with the UKRI executive team to lead and shape policies and investments for open research across UKRI and the wider UK to promote better and more impactful research. Rachel has worked in education and research policy, with a focus on digital scholarship and infrastructure development, across national organisations, including the former Higher Education Funding Council, Jisc and the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). She has directed national and international programmes that support knowledge creation, access, and impact, many of which have resulted in long-term sustainable services. She is an information scientist and expert in open science and has been an adviser to the European Commission. Rachel is currently the UK representative on the European Open Science Cloud Steering Board.
View all posts by
Rachel Bruce
