If you had an extra $2,860, what would you spend it on?

Maybe you’d replace some worn-out equipment, or buy literally thousands of new pipette tips for your biology lab. You could book a trip to an archive or a conference abroad.

Or you could pay to publish just one article openly. $2,860 is the average cost of an article processing charge, or APC charged by the biggest scholarly publishers — the fee that many journals require authors to pay in order to make their articles free to read.

Next week is Open Access Week, an international celebration of open access. Over the next week, we’ll be sharing with you how you can make your work open for everyone to read while saving as much of your money as you can for your research.

Now is an especially important time to consider your options. New requirements are coming into effect over the next few years for researchers who are publishing federally-funded research.

Come back each day from October 21 to October 25 for activities that will help you prepare to make your articles available openly — without paying APCs.

Daily to-do: Create an “Open Access Information” document

Over the next week, we’ll be asking you to do some research and collect information for yourself about open access that is specific to you and your research. To keep track of what you’re learning, we recommend starting a personalized reference document.

If you really want to get a head start, create three sections in your document:

1. Repositories
2. Policies
3. My Publications