For papers accepted after 1 January 2021: Imperial College London is a participant in the PLOS Flat Fee agreement and the PLOS Community Action Publishing agreement.

At acceptance, the publication fee will be paid from prepaid funds deposited by the Library. As this agreement only changes the way that invoices are paid, please apply for APC funding via Symplectic in the usual way. If you receive an invoice in error please send it to the Open Access Team.

PLOS Flat Fee Agreement PLOS ONE, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and PLOS Pathogens plus the newly launched PLOS Digital Health – May 2021)

Open access fees in any of these journals are automatically covered for Imperial corresponding authors from prepaid funds deposited by the Library. When submitting your manuscript to the journal, be sure to list your institutional affiliation in the journal submission system, and eligible papers should be detected and have the fees covered automatically on acceptance.

PLOS Community Action Publishing PLOS Medicine, PLOS Biology and the newly launched PLOS Sustainability & Transformation (May 2021):

Open access fees for these journals are automatically covered for Imperial corresponding authors. For Imperial co-authors where the corresponding author is at an institution not participating in the agreement, corresponding authors will be subject to ‘non-member fees’ (NMF), but these will be discounted by 25% due to having a co-author at a participating institution.

Community Action Publishing takes into account the contributions of every author — not just corresponding authors — to help distribute publishing costs equitably among the institutions who support them. For more information see PLOS Community Action Publishing FAQs.

Other journals that are included by new publishing models include the following newly launched mega journals: Water: Mega Journal, Climate: Mega Journal, and Global Pacific Health.

If you have any questions regarding this agreement or the process please contact the open access team