Open access at ICE Publishing

We are committed to both sustainable and high-quality open access publishing. There are many benefits to publishing with us.

Open access articles are free-at-the-point of reading and available globally via the internet with a CC-BY licence. If you choose to pay an article publication charge (APC) to publish gold or hybrid open access, you will be able to:

1. Share the final version of your published article as widely as you wish
2. Host it online
3. Include it in third-party mailings
4. Post the article directly on academic social networks, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu
5. Use it for commercial (fee earning) purposes
6. Print commercial quantities (>50 copies).

ICE Publishing is wholly owned by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), a registered UK charity and international membership organisation that promotes and advances civil engineering around the world. As a society publisher, we provide important financial support to ICE, supporting its charitable mission to “benefit society and advance the field of civil engineering”.

Research-funding bodies are increasingly requiring authors to make their published articles open access. ICE Publishing offers both green, hybrid and gold open-access options to authors:

• Green open access: you may self-archive the final accepted version of your article for free public use in your institutional (organisation’s) repository, in a central repository, or on some other open-access website. The final published PDF is hosted on the publisher website as the version of record
• If your research-funding body is a signatory of Plan S, there is no embargo period for you to deposit your accepted article. You may do so immediately with a CC-BY licence
• If your research-funding body is not a signatory of Plan S, we ask that you please wait 12 months before depositing your article
• Gold and hybrid open access: you can choose to pay an article publication charge (APC) to make your published article free-to-read in one of our journals if it is accepted after peer review. Upon acceptance for publication, we will send you an email containing a link to a payment webpage.

If your grant-funder requires that work funded by them be published open access, you may:

1. Post the accepted version on open, unrestricted websites or deposit it in an institutional repository, with a link to the version of record. This is the accepted version of the text that incorporates all revisions due to peer review or editorial comment, but before the article has been copyedited and typeset. It is the version that you resubmitted to the journal, rather than the PDF that is published on the journal website. The version of record is the final PDF.
• If your research-funding body is a signatory of Plan S, there is no embargo period for you to deposit your accepted article. i.e. you may do so immediately with a CC-BY licence
• If your research-funding body is not a signatory of Plan S, we ask that you please wait 12 months before depositing your article
2. Include a weblink to the version of record (the final PDF hosted on the journal webpage - see the full list of our journals).

ICE Publishing is happy to support grant-funded research through this initiative, raising the profile of our authors, employers and journals. If you have any questions about applying to place articles online, please contact us.

Questions and answers

UKRI has its own comprehensive list of common questions and answers regarding open access. The following answers are provided by us.

a) What should I do if my work was only part funded by UKRI?

In a case where UKRI support is of only marginal significance to a particular paper, authors are not expected to place their papers as openly accessible documents, freely available online to anyone who has access to the internet. It is up to researchers to use their judgement and integrity in determining which particular funder(s) to credit with having supported the work leading to any of their publications.

b) Can I pay for my paper to be made free on ICE Virtual Library if my work was not funded by UKRI?

Yes. Please contact your journal’s coordinator to discuss this.

c) Is there an approved list of open-access repositories?

Not at present. Open-access papers can easily be found, along with content that is not free, using Google Scholar. CORE searches only articles in repositories.

d) Why has ICE Publishing chosen to restrict free access to its content?

ICE Publishing is a department of Thomas Telford Ltd, the commercial subsidiary of Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), UK registered charity 210252. We provide important financial support to ICE, supporting its charitable mission to “benefit society and advance the field of civil engineering”.

e) What open access licence does ICE Publishing use?

We use the same licence for all open access articles, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International License.

Gold open access is a useful option for authors whose work is funded by a research grant. However, for practitioner authors it may present a barrier to publication. Ours journals contain papers from both author groups. As a result of this, we offer Gold, Hybrid and subscription journal options. We also offer discounts and waivers for authors who are unable to pay an APC due to, for example, being based in a developing country. This is in line with ICE’s aims to encourage knowledge transfer.

2022 article publication charges (APCs) for gold and hybrid open access journals (plus VAT in UK):

PAPER

• Engineering tier 1 (£1,800): Advances in Cement Research, Engineering Sustainability, Environmental Geotechnics, Geotechnical Engineering, Géotechnique, Geosynthetics International, Magazine of Concrete Research, Structures and Buildings, Transport
• Engineering tier 2 (£1,400): remaining engineering titles (excluding Geotechnical Research and Géotechnique Letters).
• Letters journal (£600): Géotechnique Letters 
• Gold open access (£1,000): paper in Geotechnical Research
• ICE Science journal (£1,600): The five science journals

SHORT ARTICLE

• All titles: short articles (Briefing etc) £600

We use the same licence for all open access articles, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International License.

Available discounts applicable for all titles (that of the greatest value will be applied):

• ICE member as corresponding author - 15% discount
• Members of International Geosynthetics Society or British Dam Society (as corresponding author) - 15% discount
• ICE Publishing journal Panel/Board member as corresponding author - 20% discount applicable to any ICE Publishing title
• Employer or direct subscriber to ICE Publishing Complete (15% discount to APC), Current Engineering (15% discount to APC) and Premier collection customer (20% discount to APC)
• INASP country list – see tables below

100% discount

• Asia:      Afghanistan
• Africa:   Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Dem. Rep of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo
• Asia-Pacific Timor-Leste.

75% discount

• Asia:      Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Kyrgyz Republic, Lao PDR, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Rep.
• Africa:    Comoros, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
• Latin America: Haiti
• Asia-Pacific:   Solomon Islands.

My university has negotiated that I can publish open access in other journals without paying a fee. Why can’t I do this with ICE Publishing?

Your university is likely to have signed a Transitional Agreement (TA) with the publisher of the journal that you refer to. Publishing open access still has a cost – this has been incorporated in the amount your university library annually pays to that journal publisher. 

TAs are designed to take your university library from the traditional model of buying an annual journal subscription, toward solely paying per-article open access fees. This change rests upon the idea that open access will soon become the most common way that authors at your institution publish. 

A small minority of ICE publishing authors currently choose to pay to publish open access. This reflects a) the low take-up of open access within our author community, b) the significant practitioner author base within our applied research journals. It would require a significant change in our submissions profile and clear evidence of sustained growth in open access articles to enable ICE Publishing to viably transition its journal titles, a pre-requisite of entering into TA agreements.  We carefully monitor our submissions in order to keep this position under review.  

Of the minority of our authors who publish open access with ICE Publishing, a further subset of that minority had their work funded by a signatory of Plan S. If this applies to you, you can still publish with our journals using the green open access model (route 2 for compliance). When your article is accepted following peer review, deposit your text and figure files in your employer’s institutional repository. Several funders require this. 

If you have other funds that you wish to use to publish open access with us, please take a moment to read our discounts and waivers. This will allow you to take advantage of our high-quality peer review and production processes. 

What is a transformative journal?
A transformative journal is one that, in broad terms, agrees to be required to demonstrate an annual increase in the open access proportion of its content, year-on-year. It must also commit to switch to full open access (termed ‘gold’) once it reaches the threshold that 75% of its articles are published paid open-access. For more details, please visit the above weblink or contact the editorial team.

a)  Do I have to pay to submit to an ICE journal?

No, publication in our journals is 100% free. The one exception is gold open access title Geotechnical Research.

b)  If I choose to publish with a Gold or Hybrid OA model, when should I pay the article publication charge?

Authors should complete payment once their article has been accepted. Their article can then be processed for publication.

c) If some papers are freely available having had APCs paid, won't readers expect overall subscription costs to be reduced?

This practise is known as double-dipping, where a publisher receives income from annual subscriptions as well as APCs. The low level of open access at ICE Publishing does not presently require a reduction in annual journal subscriptions. We are monitoring this situation.

d)  Does OA increase a journal’s Impact Factor?

This is a source of debate. There is a logic that if an article does not have a paywall (i.e. is free to read), it will be downloaded more often and therefore potentially cited more often. This school of thought may be influenced by early highly-prestigious OA journals such as PLoS1. Website The Open Access Citation Advantage Service (OACA) tracks reports on this topic.

e) What is a paywall?