AGU is committed to inclusive and equitable scientific publishing. All accepted papers will be published regardless of the author’s ability to pay publication fees. Depending on the journal, there are 3 types of fees that might be associated with the publication of your paper: Base Publication Fee, Excess Page Fee (for overlength articles), or Open Access Article Processing Charge (OA APC). Details on these fees are provided below. If you need any assistance, please contact [email protected].

To ensure availability of funding is not a barrier to publication, AGU provides various funding options for our authors, including waivers. The options are detailed on our Funding Options page. The funding options vary depending on the type of journal you choose: hybrid subscription journals (authors are not required to publish as Open Access) or fully gold Open-Access journals (all articles are published as Open Access).

Base Publication Fees

Base Publication Fees are flat fees for papers up to a certain amount of publication units (PU) and are submitted to AGU’s hybrid subscription journals. Overlength papers incur Excess Page Fees (see section below).

The formula for PU = number of words/500 + number of figures + number of tables. Articles exceeding a certain amount of PUs incur excess page fees.

Word count includes abstract, acknowledgements, text (and in-text citations), figure captions, table captions, and appendices. Equations count as one word no matter the size. Equations are not copyedited.

Word count excludes title, author list and affiliations, key words, key points, plain language summary, table text, open research section, references, and supporting information. Supporting information is not copyedited.

Base publication fees and excess page fees are waived for authors publishing their articles as Open Access. Commentaries, Introductions, Viewpoints, Comments, and Replies are free to publish.

Excess page fees

Longer papers are permitted in all journals except Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

Overlength papers incur excess page fees in addition to the base publication fee due to increased editorial and production costs.

Excess Page Fees apply for papers with more than 25 PUs with the exception of review articles which incur excess page fees after 30 PUs

Open Access Article Processing Charges (OA APCs)

As a part of our mission, AGU is focused on making science available to the widest possible audience. Open Access removes subscription paywalls, which means that more people will have access to your research so they can actively cite, read, and share data with the least possible restrictions. Authors (or their institutions or funders) pay an Open Access Article Processing Charge (APC) and retain copyright of their article which they can publish under a Creative Commons license (choosing among CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-ND, or CC-BY-NC-ND).

For authors choosing to publish as Open Access, there are no base publication fees or excess page fees. The APCs for AGU journals are listed in the tables below.

See tables below for Base Publication Fees, Excess Page Fees, and Open Access Article Processing Charges (APCs). For funding options and waivers, visit our Funding Options page for publication fees.

AGU Hybrid Subscription Journals

AGU Fully Gold Open Access Journals

There are no Base Publication Fee or Excess Page Fees for publishing in AGU’s fully gold Open Access journals.