Author pays? More and more scholarly journals do not sell subscriptions but give away the content open access, i.e. for free. Instead the publishers have the authors pay to publish.
Starting in 2010, Bremen University has been supporting Open Access publishing and is offering funding for "Article Processing Charges" or "Publication Fees" in Open Access publications to its members.
As the initial funding was provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG) the DFG's rules for funding continue to apply:
A number of publishers (Copernicus Publications, BioMed Central, Frontiers, MDPI ) charge their publication costs directly to SuUB Bremen, i.e. the submitting author will not receive an invoice. With other platforms (e.g. PLOS, Springer Nature Open Research, Hindawi) we ask authors to forward the original bill to SuUB:
Contact: Benjamin Ahlborn, tel. 0421 218 59440 ahlborn@suub.uni-bremen.de and tel. 0421 218 59415 publizieren@suub.uni-bremen.de
We will check the invoice and effect payment to the publisher. For authors to be on the safe side we strongly recommend contacting SuUB before submission to publishers not listed here or if in doubt, - we will check whether the publisher or journal is are in agreement with funding guidelines and then give a commitment to cover the costs.