Open Access Option
ASHA Journals complies fully with the open access requirements of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Wellcome, and National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Where required by their funder, authors retain the right to distribute their author accepted manuscript (AAM), such as via an institutional and/or subject repository (e.g. EuropePMC), under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence for release no later than the date of first online publication.
Regardless of any funding-source considerations, authors may choose to publish with open access in any of the ASHA journals. In doing so, simply select the Creative Commons Attribution license that best suits the work and supply that information during submission of the manuscript.
Please note: Because of the extensive costs borne by ASHA in submission and peer review, production, and online hosting and preservation, ASHA assesses an article processing charge (APC) of $2,000 for the open access option. This fee must be paid upon acceptance for publication.
To avoid potential delays in publication, ASHA strongly encourages authors to determine whether to publish via open access before submitting a manuscript. Doing so affects other processes, such as whether to require a copyright transfer agreement and how to construct the footer of the published article.
If you have already submitted your manuscript and would like to request open access, then please email journals@asha.org or complete the Open Access Request Form.
Please note: Choosing the open access option has no bearing on the nature of the peer review of the submission.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy
On April 7, 2008, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy mandated that authors who have received NIH funding must make that research publicly accessible in PubMed Central (PMC), NIH’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
ASHA now deposits to PubMed Central, on behalf of authors, any articles that have received NIH funding. These articles are made publicly available via PMC—in their final, published form—6 months after publication. All NIH-funded articles published in ASHA’s journals from the first issues of 2015 forward have been deposited to PMC.
For these deposited articles, copyright is held by ASHA unless the authors would like to also choose to publish the article as open access. Choosing to publish via open access is not a requirement of the NIH Public Access policy.
Important Note Regarding Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups:
At this time, Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups is not indexed by PubMed, and ASHA Journals cannot process the deposit of Perspectives articles into PubMed. Authors of NIH funded articles are still obliged to comply with the public access mandate by depositing the article to PubMed themselves.
Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) Deposits
The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) mandates that authors who have received DOE Funding for their research must submit their final accepted manuscript to ERIC as soon as the article has been accepted. The final accepted manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, including all modifications from the peer review process. This is not the version ultimately published in the journal, as it will not have final formatting and editing. Submission can be done through the ERIC Online Submission System.
If an accepted manuscript is being published in an ASHA journal indexed in ERIC (such as JSLHR), grantees are still required to submit their final accepted manuscript to ERIC through their online submission system.
UKRI and Wellcome Trust Open Access Policies
Authors funded by UKRI and the Wellcome Trust can be assured that publishing in the ASHA journals will allow them to be fully compliant with their funder’s open access policy. Authors can choose to comply with the requirements of UKRI or the Wellcome Trust by choosing either a gold or green open access option.
Gold Open Access
- During manuscript submission, authors must identify Wellcome Trust as a funding source.
- If the article is accepted for publication, ASHA will add a Creative Commons CC BY license to the article and will not require a copyright transfer agreement to be signed.
- Before publication, authors must ensure that they or their institution pays the article processing charge of $2,000 to ASHA .
- Upon publication, the article will be made immediately and permanently available via open access on the ASHA journal website.
- Upon publication, ASHA will deposit the final published article to PubMed Central (PMC) and to its mirror sites such as Europe PMC, on behalf of authors.
Invoicing
Wellcome Trust–funded authors electing the Gold open access option will receive an invoice that includes the article title, DOI, funder information, license information, author names and affiliation information, funder identifiers, and ORCiDs (if available).
Refunds
The author may withdraw their article at any time prior to publication without incurring an article processing charge or administrative fee. Postpublication refunds are not permitted.
Green Open Access
Authors opting for green open access will be choosing a self-archiving means of compliance with UKRI or the Wellcome Trust’s open access policy, which involves the following:
- Authors must retain a copy of their accepted manuscript (i.e., the version reflecting all peer-review related revisions).
- Authors retain the right to distribute their author accepted manuscript (AAM), such as via an institutional and/or subject repository (e.g. EuropePMC), under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license for release no sooner than the date of first online publication.
- When posting the accepted manuscript to the institutional repository, authors must add a link back to the final published version of article on the ASHA journal website.
There is no article processing charge due to ASHA for electing to use this means of providing open access to the article.
Charity Open Access Fund Support
The ASHA journals extend their Wellcome Trust support to Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) grantholders. Either the Gold or Green Open Access Option may be chosen by authors who have been funded by any of the following six COAF partners:
- Arthritis Research UK: open access policy
- Bloodwise: open access policy
- British Heart Foundation: open access policy
- Cancer Research UK: open access policy
- Parkinson’s UK open access policy
- Wellcome Trust: open access policy
Article Processing Charge Waivers
The ASHA Journals Program offers an open access publishing option to authors in which the authors pay a portion of the costs of publication. The article processing charge (APC) in this “author pays” model is set at $2,000, which is a price that factors in a subsidy from ASHA to allow for open access and a calculated cost offset (the APC) that is based on the anticipated volume of such publications in any given year. Any article published as open access will be made available immediately upon publication, with a clearly evident Creative Commons license showing on all versions of the article.
The true cost of publishing a journal article exceeds $2,000, inclusive of costs associated with submission handing, peer review, editorial oversight, copyediting, composition, online hosting, and dissemination and archiving. ASHA is a section 501(c)(6) not-for-profit professional society, so it is especially important that the limited subsidy for open access publishing be managed judiciously.
Research funding agencies are increasingly making funds available to authors specifically for payment of open access APCs, and in the absence of that specificity funders typically allow use of general grant funds to cover publication costs. ASHA acknowledges, however, that there are occasions when open access publishing may be highly favored by authors yet unavailable as an option due to limited funding, a lack of funding, or restrictions on how funding may be used. Thus, requests for waivers of the open access APC will be considered by ASHA on a case-by-case basis.
Please note: Any APC waiver request is entirely separate from any editorial decision-making. Editorial boards and reviewers do not have access to details about author’s financial contribution or lack thereof; thus, no acknowledgment of a waiver should be made within the manuscript itself.
Given the above background, you may submit a request for a waiver of the open access APC by completing this web form.
Upon your submission of the web form, the ASHA Journals Production Office will be immediately alerted to your request and will need 5 working days to render a decision. During that period, staff from the Production Office may contact you to request further details or contact information for a department head or authorizing official who can confirm that funding is insufficient or nonexistent.
If for some reason you do not receive a response within 5 full working days from submission of the form, please contact the Production Office at journals@asha.org.
