Open access fees: do you have to pay to publish a paper?

Direct answer: You owe open access fees only when a journal sets an article processing charge (APC) and you choose the route that triggers it. Open access says who may read a paper, while the APC says who pays. Gold and hybrid routes usually carry it; the other three do not.

Borrego (2023) reviewed the literature on APCs published since 2000 and states that "Some open access (OA) publishers charge authors fees to make their articles freely available online." Open access fees belong to a business model, not to open access itself. The same review reports that journals charging APCs reach a citation impact similar to journals funded by other income, so a high fee says nothing about quality.

Source: route definitions used by MAAS publishing advisers, checked against Borrego (2023) and the cOAlition S principles (cOAlition S, n.d.), read 2026-10-31.

Funder rules can remove a route before price enters. The cOAlition S principles say its funders "do not support the 'hybrid' model of publishing" except inside transformative arrangements (cOAlition S, n.d.), so such a grant will not pay hybrid open access fees.

Direct answer: Open access fees run from nothing to several thousand dollars. Scientific Reports lists US$2,850, DOAJ shows 14,790 of 23,672 journals charging no APC, and five large publishers took an estimated US$1.06 billion in fees from 2015 to 2018. The price shows a business model, not a quality grade.

Source: Scientific Reports (n.d.), the DOAJ search API (Directory of Open Access Journals, 2026) and Butler et al. (2023); the DOAJ count is of journals, not articles.

Butler et al. (2023) combined Web of Science records, Unpaywall open access status and historical price lists to estimate what authors paid Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. Hybrid fees made up US$448.3 million of the US$1.06 billion, about 42%, which means a large part of the money bought open access inside journals that readers or libraries already pay for.

Price also tracks field and rank. Gardner et al. (2021) read the fee pages of 272 oncology journals and found a median APC of US$2,810, with Q1 journals averaging US$3,285 against US$1,356 for Q4. The Scientific Reports page adds that its figure is "subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable" (Scientific Reports, n.d.), so your invoice can exceed the headline price.

Direct answer: Waiver rules for open access fees follow World Bank income bands, and Viet Nam sits in the upper middle-income band, which most rules leave out. Plan S asks for waivers only for low-income economies and discounts for lower middle-income ones, so a Vietnamese author usually needs a case-by-case request to the journal.

The World Bank sets the bands (World Bank, n.d.). For its 2027 fiscal year, low-income economies have a GNI per capita of $1,175 or less, lower middle-income economies sit between $1,176 and $4,635, and upper middle-income economies between $4,636 and $14,375. The World Bank record for Viet Nam, read on 2026-10-31, lists the country as upper middle income.

The Plan S text says a compliant journal "must provide APC waivers for authors from low-income economies and discounts for authors from lower middle-income economies, as well as waivers and discounts for other authors with demonstrable needs" (cOAlition S, n.d.). The last clause is the opening for a Vietnamese author: the policy names need as a ground, so you can argue need even though your country band is excluded.

Kowaltowski et al. (2023) counted Scopus papers from the previous ten years by country band. Under Plan S bands, 0.35% of papers qualified for a full waiver and 1.32% for a discount, and under the wider Research4Life bands 1.12% and 4.05%. They also found that only 32% of papers from middle-income countries outside those bands were open access, against 52% for waiver-eligible countries and 45% for high-income ones. In their words, these countries "are expected to pay full APCs" despite "much smaller research budgets" (Kowaltowski et al., 2023).

Direct answer: At Scientific Reports, a Vietnamese author with no grant faces US$2,850 plus any tax, an amount equal to 61% of the lowest GNI per capita (US$4,636) that the World Bank still counts as upper middle income. Four moves can lower it: a no-APC journal, a repository copy, a need-based request, or a library agreement.

Source: arithmetic by MAAS from Scientific Reports (n.d.), World Bank (n.d.), Kowaltowski et al. (2023) and Directory of Open Access Journals (2026); percentages are shares of Scopus paper origins, not odds for your request.

The table gives a decision rule, not a promise. Because the fee is large against national income and the standard bands miss most authors, treat paying as a last step. Look for a no-APC journal in your field, deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository, and write to the editors about need only if the journal fits. Gardner et al. (2021) found that 140 of 272 oncology journals, or 51.5%, offered a waiver to low and lower middle-income authors, so waiver pages exist but are written for other country bands. Our guide to choosing a Scopus journal shows how to weigh fit beside cost.

Direct answer: Choose CC BY 4.0 unless your funder or journal names another licence. cOAlition S requires that licence by default and accepts CC BY-SA 4.0 or CC0 as secondary alternatives, so a narrower licence can put a funded paper outside the funder's rules.

A Creative Commons licence tells readers what they may do with your paper. cOAlition S "recommends using Creative Commons licenses (CC) and requires the use of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license by default" (cOAlition S, n.d.). Its members may approve CC BY-ND for an individual article only when the grantee explicitly requests and justifies it.

CC BY 4.0 lets others share and adapt the article, including commercially, as long as the author is credited. Authors sometimes fear this gives the work away. In practice the licence governs reuse while you remain the credited author, and your copyright position is settled by the funder contract and the journal's publishing agreement. Find the licence choice in the journal's author form at acceptance, and ask the editorial office early if your funder requires a licence the form does not list. Our timeline guide for Vietnamese authors shows where that form usually appears.

A MAAS publishing advisory session can lay out open access fees and routes for one specific paper: which journals charge, which accept a need-based request, and what your funder allows. Bring the journal's author guidelines, its fee page and any grant conditions.

Most authors arrive with one of three situations: a journal they like that charges a fee, a funder rule they have not fully read, or a tight budget and a worry that publishing openly is out of reach. Each is easier to settle before submission than after acceptance, when the invoice is already on its way.

The service carries no grade target and no promise of acceptance, and it works on your own paper, so you stay the author who decides, pays and submits. If the adviser assigned to you does not fit your field, you can ask for a different expert, and that swap is the only commitment the service makes about fit.

These guides cover decisions that sit next to the fee question when you prepare a paper for submission. Each one is written for a single task, so pick the guide that matches your step.

• How do you avoid predatory journals when publishing your research?: telling a legitimate APC from a predatory demand before you pay anything, with the warning signs worth checking on the journal's website first
• How do you choose the right Scopus journal for your paper?: weighing open access status beside scope, quartile and review speed when you shortlist journals for a first submission
• How do you keep your research paper from being retracted?: the integrity rules that protect your record after publication, including how corrections and retractions are handled and what you owe the journal if an error appears in your paper later
• Who qualifies as an author on a research paper?: settling authorship and ORCID details before anyone pays a fee on the paper's behalf

• Borrego, Á. (2023). Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review. Learned Publishing, 36(3), 359–378. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1558

• Butler, L.-A., Matthias, L., Simard, M.-A., Mongeon, P., & Haustein, S. (2023). The oligopoly's shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges. Quantitative Science Studies, 4(4), 778–799. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272

• cOAlition S. (n.d.). Principles and implementation. https://www.coalition-s.org/principles-and-implementation/

• Directory of Open Access Journals. (2026). Journals search API [Data set queried 31 October 2026]. https://doaj.org/api/search/journals/

• Gardner, U. G., Thompson, P. S., Burton, J., Stewart, C., Fuller, C. D., Rooney, M. K., & Ludmir, E. B. (2021). Article processing charge waiver policies as a barrier to oncology scholarship in low- and lower-middle-income countries. JCO Global Oncology, 7, 1413–1417. https://doi.org/10.1200/go.21.00143

• Kowaltowski, A. J., Arruda, J. R. F., Nussenzveig, P. A., & Silber, A. M. (2023, March 9). Guest post: Article processing charges are a heavy burden for middle-income countries. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/03/09/guest-post-article-processing-charges-are-a-heavy-burden-for-middle-income-countries/

• Scientific Reports. (n.d.). Open access. Springer Nature. https://www.nature.com/srep/open-access

• World Bank. (n.d.). World Bank country and lending groups. https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups

This article is part of the MAAS Journal series for Vietnamese postgraduate students and researchers. MAAS Publishing Advisory is an advisory partner: we help authors compare routes and prepare their own work, and we do not write, submit or guarantee acceptance of work on an author's behalf.