Open Access Option  

Publishing Options for Authors in the Life and Earth Science Journal

Life Sciences offers authors two primary choices for publishing their research: Gold open access and Subscription.

Gold open access

Under Gold open access, articles are freely available to both subscribers and the wider public with permitted reuse. Authors, their institution, or funder are required to pay an open access publication fee. Alternatively, Subscription-based articles are made available to subscribers as well as developing countries and patient groups through access programs, with no open access publication fee.

The publication choice does not affect the peer review process or acceptance of the submission. However, for gold open access articles, authors are offered a choice of user licenses, defining the permitted reuse of the articles. These include Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licenses.

To provide gold open access, the journal has a publication fee (Article Publishing Charge, APC) of USD 3400, excluding taxes, ensuring immediate and permanent free access to the article.

Subscription model

Authors publishing under the subscription model can self-archive their accepted manuscript immediately and enable public access from their institution’s repository after an embargo period of 12 months from the date of formal online publication in its final and fully citable form.

Elsevier has also established open access agreements with various institutions and university consortia worldwide, and provides guidance for authors on how to comply with funding body open access policies. Additionally, Elsevier supports responsible sharing of research published in its journals.

For full details on open access publishing options, pricing policy, funding arrangements, and responsible sharing, authors are encouraged to visit the open access page and funding arrangements page on Elsevier’s website.