The papers submitted for publication to Annals of Limnology and Oceanography (ALO) incurs Article Processing Charge (APC). An APC is a contribution made by the authors to make their work published in an open access journal. This amount is usually paid by research funding institutions or the authors themselves.

Why is there an APC?

In order to bear the variable costs associated with Open Access online publishing paradigm and maintenance of the journal, Annals of Limnology and Oceanography solely depends on the authors for monetary contribution. The contributions solicited from the authors are also used in collaboration services and promotions which ultimately helps in increasing the visualization of the published manuscripts.

The costs are involved in every stage of the publication process, such as copy editing, article conversion in different formats, uploading articles, archiving, DOI, indexing and, journal maintenance. As Annals of Limnology and Oceanography operates in Open Access and do not receive any assistance from OA Journals Funding Institutions, so authors are asked to pay an article processing charge (APC) for their article to be published open access under a Creative Commons licence. This licence allows readers to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to alter, transform, or build upon the material, including for commercial use, providing the original author is credited.

APC is of paramount importance for covering the cost of publishing and for disseminating quality publication services. It also helps in promoting the published research works on different Indexing platforms, DOI and other related services. APC should be regarded as an essential and suitable section in the budget of the authors' for research. The APC also helps in covering partially the cost incurred in assigning the manuscript for peer-review process and for formatting the manuscript as per the publication guidelines. At present the Article Processing Charge for one article in Annals of Limnology and Oceanography is 1849 USD.

Finally, with regard to APC, Annals of Limnology and Oceanography (ALO) abides by the philosophy that APC will never be a barrier to publishing. The APC is just a resource to operate an Open Access journal for disseminating scientific knowledge to a larger reader database.