Open Access

The MIT Press publishes a significant number of open access journal articles and e-books each year. Our open access publishing program in journals began with the conversion of Information Technology and International Development from subscription-based to open access in 2006. Since then, the Press has continued to frequently add new titles to our OA library in order for us to bring authors to the widest global audience possible.

The Press employs a variety of business models to offset publication costs for our titles and is pleased to offer OA options for each journal that we publish. Below, you’ll find information on article processing charges, Creative Commons licenses, and much more.

The Press is particularly interested in open access experiments including overlay journals such as Rapid Reviews: COVID-19. If you are interested in discussing open access publishing options for your journal please contact Director of Journals & Open Access Nick Lindsay at nlindsay@mit.edu.

For more information about The MIT Press open access book publishing program please visit our OA Books page.

Hybrid Journals

Hybrid journals are subscription-based journals that offer open access options for a fee. For information on how to publish your accepted MIT Press journal article as an open access article, including Creative Commons license options, in one of our hybrid journals, please e-mail journals-rights@mit.edu. We can also accommodate requests to publish already accepted articles as open access. Our OA conversion fee is $1,600.00 per article.

Procedure for publishing accepted articles open access:

1. Please send the name of the individual or organization responsible for payment of the open access fee to journals-rights@mit.edu. We will send an invoice in the amount of US$1600.00 as directed.
2. Once the payment has been received, MIT Press Journals will adjust the website citation line of the article to indicate publication under a Creative Commons CC BY license. More information on the rights granted under this license are available from the Creative Commons website.
3. The article will appear on the MIT Press Journals website as open access, immediately accessible upon publication of the associated issue, or sooner if the article appears in the journal’s early access section.

The MIT Press journals that offer this option are:

• African Arts
• Asian Economic Papers
• Artificial Life
• ARTMargins
• Computer Music Journal
• Education Finance and Policy
• Evolutionary Computation
• Global Environmental Politics
• Grey Room
• International Security
• Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
• Journal of Cold War Studies
• The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
• Leonardo
• Linguistic Inquiry
• Neural Computation
• The New England Quarterly
• October
• PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
• Perspectives on Science
• PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality
• Thresholds
• The Review of Economics and Statistics

Diamond Open Access Journals

Diamond open access journals are ones where there is no fee to publish and the content is open to anyone to read. All of these titles employ a Creative Commons license for individual articles. These MIT Press titles are diamond open access:

• American Journal of Law and Inequality
• Computational Linguistics
• Daedalus
• Data Intelligence
• Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization
• Harvard Data Science Review
• Rapid Reviews: COVID-19
• Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
• Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Gold Open Access Journals

Gold open access journals have article processing charges to cover costs associated with publication. MIT Press gold OA titles are:

Network Neuroscience: Network Neuroscience charges an APC of $1,750 per article which will be billed upon acceptance of the manuscript. Commissioned Review and Perspective articles may be exempt from the APC, subject to prior arrangement with the Editor. Authors who are unable to pay may apply for a fee waiver; waivers will be granted on a case-by-case basis. All articles in Network Neuroscience are published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This license provides unlimited free access and unrestricted reuse of original works of all types. By adopting this license, authors agree to make their articles available for reuse, without requiring permission or charging fees. Articles may be copied, distributed, posted or reused as long as the original authors and the source of the article are properly cited. Please note that as of January 1, 2022 the APC for Network Neuroscience will be increasing to $2,250. All manuscripts submitted after that date will be subjected to the new fee.

Neurobiology of Language: To offset expenses associated with the editorial process at NoL — including peer-review management, data tagging and composition, copyediting, online hosting and archiving, and publishing — the journal charges a publication fee to the authors, institutions, or funders for each article published. The fee is $1150 per article, which will be billed to the corresponding author upon acceptance of the article. There is no fee for invited articles. Authors are not charged for color figures, tables, or multimedia files.

Publication fees are $850 per article if the first and last authors are both members of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. If you would like to join SNL and take advantage of membership, visit the SNL official webpage (http://www.neurolang.org). Accepted manuscripts will not be published until all payment has been received. Neurobiology of Language articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This license provides unlimited free access and unrestricted reuse of original works of all types. By adopting this license, authors agree to make their articles available for reuse, without requiring permission or charging fees. Articles may be copied, distributed, posted or reused as long as the original authors and the source of the article are properly cited.

This Creative Commons license complies with funders who require an unrestricted attribution license at time of acceptance, including Wellcome Trust, Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). NoL articles funded by the NIH, Wellcome Trust, or other organizations that require open access upon publication, will be sent to the MIT Press special collection within PubMed.

Authors who are unable to pay may apply for a fee waiver; waivers will be granted on a case-by-case basis. Residents of certain countries are automatically entitled to a fee waiver – please send a query to the Managing Editor if your institution is in a country with limited capacity to fund scientific inquiry.

Quantitative Science Studies: QSS  is an open access journal that follows the Fair Open Access Principles. Contributions are published in the journal under a CC-BY license. Authors retain their copyright. Article processing charges (APCs) for articles and reviews are $750 for members of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) and $1200 for non-members.

For articles submitted before January 1, 2023, the old APC rates apply (USD 600 for ISSI members and USD 800 for non-members.)

APC waivers for Quantitative Science Studies

Authors are expected to pay the APC of QSS from their own research funds or from funds for open access publishing available at their institution. We recognize that some authors may not have access to such funds. To enable these authors to publish their work in QSS, we offer the option to apply for an APC waiver.

A generous donation by the Eugene Garfield Foundation enables QSS to support a limited number of authors who do not have their own funds to pay the APC of QSS. To ensure the available funds are made available to the authors that need them most, we apply the following policy for waiving APCs:

1. We expect authors to apply for an APC waiver only if they do not have any possibility to pay the APC from their own research funds or from funds for open access publishing available at their institution. This applies to all authors of an article (not only the corresponding author).
2. If an APC waiver is granted, this will cover the full APC for articles with a corresponding author from group A and B countries in the Research4Life country classification. For articles with a corresponding author from other countries, USD 600 will be waived. Authors are expected to pay the rest of the APC themselves (only in exceptional situations the full APC may be waived).
3. We expect authors (and author teams) to apply for at most one APC waiver per year.
4. We request organizers of special issues to arrange their own funding to cover the APCs of the articles published in a special issue.

If all authors take their responsibility to strictly adhere to the above policy, we expect that for articles published in QSS in 2023 the available funds will be sufficient to grant APC waivers to all authors entitled to such a waiver. However, the availability of sufficient funds cannot be guaranteed. If the available funds turn out to be insufficient, APC waivers will be granted on a first come, first serve basis.

For situations not covered by this policy, ad hoc arrangements may be made by the editors of QSS.

APC breakdown for Quantitative Science Studies

The MIT Press has undertaken an effort to break out the APC for QSS into cost categories shown as a percentage of the total APC. These are best estimates prior to publication of the journal and as such represent a good faith attempt to account for all of the costs associated with publication without knowing precisely what they will be. Variable factors such as manuscript length, number of submissions, and marketing costs will have an effect on the estimates and we will revise them before the end of volume one. We’d like to note that our partners at the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics have been very flexible in working with MIT Press to keep APCs for QSS low by taking on certain key editorial functions completely within their purview. Without their assistance, MIT Press would not be able to establish the APCs at their current level. The Press and the ISSI will periodically review APC for QSS.

The APC breakdown below is based on the $750 APC charge for ISSI members:

• Production (copyediting, proofreading, composition): 60%
• Manuscript submission system: 5%
• Hosting Platform: 10%
• Marketing: 10%
• OA Fee waivers: 5%
• MIT Press Overhead (includes APC administration): 5%
• Investment in technology development: 5%

If you have any questions about open access at MIT Press please contact Journals and Open Access Director, Nick Lindsay at nlindsay (at) mit dot edu.