Gold Open Access agreement with Frontiers

A new publishing agreement with the scientific publisher Frontiers has come into force at USI, following those already reached with Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Karger, Wiley, SAGE, IEEE, and PLOS. These agreements are negotiated by swissuniversities and are implemented by the USI Libraries. They combine access to publishers' journals (read) with the possibility to publish free of charge in Open Access (publish) while minimising cost increases. These are further essential elements in the implementation of the Swiss National Open Access (OA) Strategy. 

Frontiers: a pilot agreement 

Frontiers is a Gold OA publisher headquartered in Lausanne, but active globally. The agreement concluded with Frontiers is a one-year pilot, which consists of a pre-paid amount from USI to finance APCs (Article Processing Charges) of articles published by its researchers. This means that only a limited number of articles will be funded in this way, on a “first come, first served” basis. 

Once the available fund is exhausted, charges for articles published in Frontiers journals would still be reimbursed according to USI's usual procedures. 

The agreement applies to all articles submitted (or re-submitted) after 1 March 2022 for all Frontiers titles, provided that the corresponding authors include a researcher under contract with USI. 

During the submission process, USI affiliation must be correctly indicated. We also strongly recommend that you use your institutional e-mail address. 

For more information about publishing in OA and researchers’ eligibility, please refer to the contents of www.desk.usi.ch/en/funding-open-access-publications. 

USI Libraries will be happy to provide further information on the agreement with Frontiers as well as on OA publication in general.