Many institutions worldwide are paying individual APC invoices to a wide variety of publishers where no central agreements exist. Typically, such individual APC payments are paid from a central Open Access Fund.

Such an institutional Open Access Fund can be managed within Oable. Institutions can choose to have Oable manage those funds to ensure a seamless APC management process. For more information about the OA Fund Management model, please see the section immediately below.

If an institution using Oable chooses to have Oable manage their APC funds, a dedicated Deposit Account will be set up in the system for this purpose. Institutions are still responsible for approving or denying the faculty Requests in Oable, but the Deposit Account will not be linked to any publisher, as shown below:

In addition, any approved Request which should be paid for with the Oable APC Deposit Account will be paid by Oable. For these Requests, Oable will manage the payment to the publishers, mark these APC invoices as paid in Oable, and deduct the appropriate APC amount from the Deposit Account's balance. All APC payments Oable makes on behalf of the institution can be found in the <Transactions> tab.

For an example of an Oable-managed APC fund, please see the video below:

If an institution decides to not have Oable manage their open access fund, the institution is still responsible for approving or denying the faculty APC requests in Oable, as usual, but they are also responsible for the consequential payment of invoices received. Invoices can then be uploaded and marked as paid in Oable. This changes the Payment Method for a Request from Deposit Account to Invoice, which will then also appear as such on the <Transaction> screen, as shown below:

What's Next?

How do publication token payments work for Agreements?

How do APC payments work for Gold OA Agreements?