Fee Waiver

Waivers or discounts to reduce article publishing charges (APCs) for open-access articles are available to:

• corresponding authors with primary affiliations based in countries defined by the World Bank as Low-Income Economies, who can apply for a 100% APC waiver; or
• corresponding authors with primary affiliations based in countries defined by the World Bank as Lower-Middle-Income Economies, who can apply for a 50% discount on the normal APC.

Please note that changes made to these lists by the World Bank each July can take a short period of time to be reflected in our submission systems. You may find discrepancies until the beginning of August while the update work takes place.

We also consider discretionary APC waiver requests for authors who don’t meet these criteria. We do not want fees to prevent the publication of worthy work.

Requests must be made on submission; we are unable to consider any requests later in the publication process. Please include supporting evidence for why a discount or waiver would be necessary in your circumstances.

Your request should also include details of:

• The affiliation and country of residence of all authors
• Details of where the research was conducted
• Confirmation of all research grant funding received

To guarantee peer-review integrity, the waiver process is not managed by journal academic editors.

Please note that if we have reason to believe an author has provided false information as part of their waiver request, we reserve the right to rescind any discount offered, and the full APC will apply.