Article Processing Charges (APCs) are fees that publishers charge an author (or an institution on their behalf) to make their article fully open to all who wish to read it on the publisher's platform. This fee is charged once the article has been accepted for publication. The article will often be published under a Creative Commons license or other open license. These fees can be as high as a few thousand dollars.
Book Processing Charges (BPCs) are similar to APCs, but they apply to open access monographs rather than articles.
Read-and-Publish Agreements (sometimes called transformative or transitional agreements) are contracts that institutions (typically libraries) enter into with publishers to offset APCs. The idea behind this is to transform article access subscriptions that institutions already pay for into one that will also include prepayment of open access publication fees - rather than paying simply for access to scholarship, they pay to make the scholarship accessible to all. The result may be APCs waived in their entirety or discounts on APCs for researchers affiliated with the institution that has the contract with the publisher.
