What is the OhioLINK Institute of Physics journals agreement?
OhioLINK's agreement with Institute of Physics (IOP) offers two major benefits for students and faculty at institutions of higher education in Ohio. First, it increases access to important published research from all 70+ Institute of Physics journals for libraries statewide in physics, materials science, biosciences, astronomy and astrophysics, environmental sciences, and mathematics. Second, authors from participating OhioLINK institutions can publish their articles as open access in all eligible IOP journals, without any limit and at no cost to the author and at no additional cost to any institution.
OhioLINK's agreement with IOP applies to articles in either fully open access journals (in which all articles are open access, so there is never a subscription fee for the journal) or hybrid open access journals (in which authors have the option to publish as open access, so that the journal has some open access articles and some subscription access articles). IOP uses the term "transformative agreements" to refer to its agreements that allow for open access publishing. Articles published as open access under this agreement will use a CC-BY 4.0 license. OhioLINK's agreement with IOP ensures that eligible corresponding authors can publish their articles with no APC charge.
Institute of Physics' online open access information
In order to be eligible to publish open access at no cost in an IOP journal under this deal, the corresponding author of the article (see below for definition) must be affiliated with an institution that participates in OhioLINK’s Electronic Journal Center (EJC), a full-text, searchable database of electronic journal articles from top scholarly publishers. There is no limit on the number times an author can request open access funding under this agreement.
The corresponding author is the author who submits the manuscript and is responsible for communicating with the journal during the submission, peer review, and publication process. Eligibility for open access publishing under OhioLINK's agreement with IOP ("transformative agreement") is based on the corresponding author's affiliation at the time of acceptance. You can find more information on corresponding authors and their roles and responsibilities when publishing an article with IOP at FAQs for Authors.
Access to no-APC open access publishing begins on January 1, 2023, and continues through December 31, 2025. This means that to publish an article as open access without paying any Article Publication Charge (APC), the article to be published must be accepted for publication after January 1, 2023, and on or before December 31, 2025.
OhioLINK's agreement with Institute of Physics allows for original research and review articles to be published as open access, including most of its fully open access and hybrid open access journals. See Eligible Journals for Transformative Agreements.
When a corresponding author submits their article with an IOP journal, they are asked to identify their institution affiliation. If they are affiliated with a participating OhioLINK member institution, IOP identifies them as eligible for open access publishing under this agreement and sends the Corresponding Author an email.
Corresponding authors will be contacted by IOP to confirm that they would like to publish their article as open access near the time of acceptance. Authors may choose to opt out and instead publish their articles behind a paywall. There is no cost to the author (or to their institution) to publish their article as open access under this agreement.
Articles published as open access under this agreement will use a CC-BY 4.0 license.
A Guide to Submitting under a Transformative Agreement
See IOP’s website with information for authors about open access publishing.
Institute of Physics offers several resources for authors interested in publishing their articles open access:
OhioLINK has also created resources for this and its other open access agreements: