After saving researchers more than $2 million in 2025, UGA Libraries’ open access publishing agreements are expanding even further this year.
A newly signed read-and-publish agreement with publisher Taylor & Francis brings the list of open access publishing opportunities at UGA to more than 9,000 journal titles across 14 scholarly publishers.
“I really appreciate UGA Libraries’ efforts to make open access publishing more accessible. It makes a big difference in helping research reach beyond academia and into the hands of practitioners, community partners, and the broader public,” said Liwei Zhang, assistant professor of social work, whose study in Journal of Public Child Welfare was one of the first published fee-free through the new agreement.
“My research examines how financial assistance programs help prevent child maltreatment and improve family well-being. Making this work publicly available allows practitioners, agencies, and international researchers, especially those without access to institution subscriptions, to engage with the findings,” Zhang said. “Open access allows that evidence to be more widely used to inform policy and support evidence-based practice.”
Stacey Neuharth-Pritchett, professor and senior associate dean in the Mary Frances Early College of Education, said that in her experience as a journal editor herself, libraries-supported open access publishing agreements aid not only in increasing the impact and citations of studies but also in speeding up the publication process.
“Given the substantial institutional investment in faculty scholarship, open access aligns with our shared goal of producing actionable knowledge that directly benefits the taxpayers and communities who support our work,” she said, adding that she is excited to see her study, soon to be published in the Journal of Applied School Psychology, quickly in the hands of school policy makers.
“By identifying critical inconsistencies in school asthma management, the study offers actionable insights for improving coordination among educators, school nurses, families, and healthcare providers to better support students with asthma,” she said. “Because of this support for open access publishing, the paper can be immediately accessed by stakeholders who need timely information. Since the work is aimed at P–12 schools—many of which do not have subscriptions to scholarly journals—removing paywalls and copyright restrictions greatly increases its reach and impact. Given that the paper addresses student health issues, making the findings readily available ensures that school-based stakeholders can act quickly and more effectively to support students with chronic illnesses such as asthma.”
The three-year agreement provides UGA-affiliated corresponding authors a complete waiver of Article Processing Charges (APCs) for open access publication across more than 2,000 Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open Select (Hybrid) journals.
In addition to publishing in the STEM and Health Sciences fields, Taylor & Francis offers one of the largest Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) portfolios. This new agreement supports UGA Libraries commitment to expanding open access publishing opportunities for UGA authors in HSS fields—areas that have traditionally had more limited funding available for open access publishing.
“UGA Libraries is excited to support increased open access publishing opportunities for the humanities and social sciences. By lowering barriers to publication and expanding access to a broad portfolio of journals, this agreement enables UGA scholars to share their work more widely, enhancing both its visibility and scholarly impact,” said Emily Hopkins, director of collections for UGA Libraries. “We also value the ongoing feedback of our research community as we identify new areas where the Libraries can further support open and equitable access to scholarship.”
In addition to contracts with large publishing companies Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley, UGA Libraries has contracts in place to cover article processing charges for open access publishing with American Chemical Society, Association of Computing Machinery, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Company of Biologists, Institute of Physics, John Benjamins, Microbiology Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Contracts with BioMed Central and MDPI offer article processing charge discounts.
For more information about open publishing at UGA, contact a librarian.