
Open Access publishing
TOKENY
Through the CzechElib consortium, the Biology Center has entered into so-called transformation agreements with several leading publishers. These agreements involve converting a portion of the read fee into an Open Access publishing fee. The Article Publishing Charge (APC) is the amount an author must pay to have the results of their work published in open access. Thanks to these transformation agreements, the BC receives a certain number of tokens for OA publishing each year under significantly favorable terms.
If you meet the requirements for receiving the token, neither you nor BC will pay any APC fee!

Researchers at the BC CAS can use tokens (APC payments) free of charge to publish articles in Wiley’s hybrid open-access journals.
K dispozici je 21 tokenů pro rok 2026.
Rules:
1. The corresponding submitting author must be affiliated with BC (this does not preclude the article from having multiple corresponding authors).
2. The journal must be in Q1 within its scientific group in Web of Science (or Scopus) according to the Article Influence Score (if you are unsure, contact the Open Science Manager at frantisek.vorel@bc.cas.cz).
3. Requests for tokens for publishing articles in journals ranked in Q2 will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the BC Director. Journals ranked in Q3 and Q4 are not eligible!
When selecting a Creative Commons license for the copyright of a published article, we recommend choosing the CC-BY license whenever possible, rather than the more restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Starting in 2026, researchers at the BC CAS can use tokens (APC payments) free of charge to publish articles in Elsevier’s hybrid journals (more than 1,600 titles).
There are 13 tokens available for 2026.
Rules:
1. The corresponding submitting author must be affiliated with BC (this does not preclude the article from having multiple corresponding authors).
2. The journal must be in Q1 within its scientific group in Web of Science (or Scopus) according to the Article Influence Score (if you are unsure, contact the Open Science Manager at frantisek.vorel@bc.cas.cz).
3. Requests for tokens for publishing articles in journals ranked in Q2 will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the BC Director. Journals ranked in Q3 and Q4 are not eligible!
When selecting a Creative Commons license for the copyright of a published article, we recommend choosing the CC-BY license whenever possible, rather than the more restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Starting in 2026, researchers at the BC CAS can use tokens (APC payments) free of charge to publish articles in all open-access journals published by Cambridge University Press (more than 400 titles), including both fully open-access and hybrid journals.
The number of tokens is unlimited!
Rules:
1. The corresponding submitting author must be affiliated with BC (this does not preclude the article from having multiple corresponding authors).
2. Authors must use an email address with an institutional domain (bc.cas.cz, entu.cas.cz, paru.cas.cz, etc.) when submitting their articles.
3. The journal must be ranked in Q1 within its scientific category in Web of Science (or Scopus) based on the Article Influence Score (If you are unsure, please contact the Open Science Manager at frantisek.vorel@bc.cas.cz).
4. Requests for tokens to publish articles in journals ranked in Q2 will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the BC Director. Journals ranked in Q3 and Q4 are not eligible!
When selecting a Creative Commons license for the copyright of a published article, we recommend choosing the CC-BY license whenever possible, rather than the more restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Starting in 2026, researchers at the BC CAS can use tokens (APC payments) free of charge to publish articles in all open-access journals published by Oxford University Press (more than 450 titles), including both fully open-access and hybrid journals. The exception is approximately 20 journals in the social sciences.
The number of tokens is unlimited!
Rules:
1. The corresponding submitting author must be affiliated with BC (this does not preclude the article from having multiple corresponding authors).
2. Authors must use an email address with an institutional domain (bc.cas.cz, entu.cas.cz, paru.cas.cz, etc.) when submitting their articles.
3. The journal must be ranked in Q1 within its scientific category in Web of Science (or Scopus) based on the Article Influence Score (If you are unsure, please contact the Open Science Manager at frantisek.vorel@bc.cas.cz).
4. Requests for tokens to publish articles in journals ranked in Q2 will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the BC Director. Journals ranked in Q3 and Q4 are not eligible!
When selecting a Creative Commons license for the copyright of a published article, we recommend choosing the CC-BY license whenever possible, rather than the more restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND license.