Waiver Policy

Waiver Policy

BMJ Open operates a transparent waiver policy. This is to support researchers who are unable to meet some or the entire cost associated with publishing open access.

Qualifying for a waiver

To help researchers from low-income economies listed below, BMJ Open provides an automatic 100% waiver of any Article Processing Charges. This is applicable for manuscripts where all authors' listed affiliation is in one of these countries.

Additionally, BMJ Open will provide a 50% reduction in any APCs when the author(s) of an article does not have the funding required to cover these charges and can provide one of the following to demonstrate this:

• Signed letter from author(s) suitable institutional representative, such as institutional Head of Department, with verifiable institutional email address confirming payment will be made from author’s personal funds (all authors must provide a letter to this effect).
• Signed letter from retired or independent author(s) indicating their lack of institutional association and confirming payment will be made from personal funds (all authors on paper must be retired or independent and confirm this).
• Signed letter from the author(s) institution(s) confirming budget constraints, indicating their funding body does not cover publication charges or indicating the institutional budgets are severely impacted. This must be signed by the Institutional Head of Department with verifiable institutional email address clearly stating the budget constraints (all authors must provide a letter to this effect).

Requests to apply for a 50% reduction in APCs should be made when submitting your manuscript by contacting info@bmjopen.org. Requests made during the review process or after acceptance will not be considered.