The article processing charge (APC) is a fee that is requested by the journal manager to an author before their submission gets published. many journals use this practice as a source of income for their commercial journal or in some cases it is needed for paying the cost of the journal to allow the journal to provide open-access material freely to any visitor.
Especially for a small private publisher that needs some cost to make the journal can be managed professionally. Some costs needed in running an online journal such as :
- Journal hosting/server
- Salary for the team of journal manager
- Cost for yearly DOI to the DOI provider
- Administration costs such as EISSN or PISSN
- Printing the hard copy version of the journal
Fortunately, OJS aware of this need, so it can be configured easily in the OJS system. Here are the steps to allow APC configuration to be able to work
1. Configuration of Payment Channel #
The first step that needs to be done before continuing the later process, you need to set up the default payment channel that will accept the payment either using Paypal or using another channel such as Razorpay in India or another payment channel.
For using Paypal you can follow this link as a guide to setting it up, or you can use our service to let the setup be done by our team here.
For using Razorpay (for Indian business owners only) you can check this tutorial for setting it up.
2. Set up the APC in the OJS system #
In OJS 3 setup APC can be done with very little effort.
In short, you can pay attention to the below image to know about the workflow and how the APC works in OJS:
Here is the step to setting the APC in OJS 3 : #
Enable payment #
Access the Distributions in the OJS backend and check this option :
After you have enabled the option refresh your browser then you will find a new menu :
Configure Article Processing Charge #
The new menu item will be shown below:
Requesting Author to pay for APC #
After the fees are determined in the previous process, then a journal manager can request the payment for APC to the author by sending the submission to the Review Process.
In the Review Process after the Journal Manager clicks this button :
There will be pop-up windows that require the Author to make payment :
This is an example of the link after the Editor save those payment request :
Other than the OJS sending a publication fee request to the email, the notification is also available in the dashboard of the Author after he/she login the OJS backend.
That’s it, thank you for reading our article.
