Case Report Publication Fees Explained

Many open-access journals charge authors to publish. Before you submit a case report, it helps to know what those fees are, when they are charged and what they pay for.

What is an article processing charge?

An article processing charge (APC) is a fee paid by the author, or the author's institution or funder, when an article is accepted. It replaces subscription income: the article is free to read, so the cost of publishing moves to the author side.

APCs are usually charged after acceptance, not at submission. A few journals also charge a separate submission fee, which is not refunded if the manuscript is rejected.

What case report journals charge

Fees vary widely. At many open-access case report journals the APC is several hundred US dollars, and at some it is well over a thousand. Some journals add charges for colour figures, extra pages or fast-track handling. Others charge nothing at all.

Always check the journal's own fees page for the current figure, and check whether the price includes everything or only the base charge.

Questions to ask before you submit

  • Is there a submission fee, a publication fee, or both?
  • When is the fee charged, and is any part refundable?
  • Are there extra charges for figures, length or withdrawal?
  • Are waivers available, and who qualifies?
  • What does the fee buy: peer review, a DOI, open access under a CC BY licence?

Free does not mean lower standards

A journal can be free to publish because its costs are covered some other way, for example by a society, an institution or a publisher's own budget. What matters is how the journal works: whether it runs real peer review, registers DOIs, publishes under an open licence and states its indexing status honestly.

What ASIDE Case Reports charges

Nothing. ASIDE Case Reports has no submission fee, no article processing charge, no page or colour charge and no fee to withdraw, for any author from any country. Every article is peer reviewed double-anonymously, receives a Crossref DOI and is published open access under CC BY 4.0.

The journal is not currently listed in DOAJ, PubMed or Scopus. We state this so you can decide with the full picture.

Submit your case report, free Why publish with ASIDE Case Reports →