Editorial —Open access publishing at EPL - IOPscience

"Among all this confusion, it could be tempting to ignore open access and hope it goes away. This would be self-defeating, amounting to burying one's own work. Fortunately, there is now a simple route to open access that does not rely on authors paying APCs and that is increasingly available to physicists: transformative agreements. Simply put, the transformation in question is to invert the traditional subscription model. Instead of libraries subscribing to receive physical copies of a journal, they now pay for researchers at their institution to publish in that same journal, with the whole world able to read for free. In the same way that physicists were early adopters of preprint sharing, we have also embraced this trend: Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) has signed one of the largest collections of transformative agreements in the world which EPL has benefited from since 2021. In 2023, 19% of articles published in EPL were published open access under a transformative agreement, and this number is growing every year as more and more institutions are coming on board.

To find out if you are covered, check the list of eligible institutions [4], and whether journals in List B (which contains EPL) are included. Many of these agreements cover an unlimited number of publications for the institution. If your article's corresponding author is affiliated with an eligible institution, your work will be published with open access at no charge. There is nothing special that you have to do during the submission process: eligible authors will be picked up during processing, and if you did not originally choose open access publication we will offer you the option to retain copyright of your work while giving EPL the right to publish it under a Creative Commons license. If you have any doubt about eligibility, or want to explore options if you are not covered, please just email our editorial office and we will do what we can to help...."