Need-based full waivers and partial discounts — assessed fairly and kept strictly separate from peer review.
At Directive Publications, the ability to pay is never a barrier to publishing sound, peer-reviewed research. We are an international open-access publisher, and our mission is to make credible scholarship freely readable and reusable by everyone. That mission is undermined if a legitimate study cannot be published because its authors lack funds. For this reason we offer full fee waivers and partial discounts to authors who need them, on a need-based and case-by-case basis.
Every article we accept is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence — an irrevocable licence under which authors retain copyright — and receives a Crossref-registered DOI (prefix 10.52338). This is true whether a publication charge was paid in full, reduced, or fully waived. A waiver changes how an article is funded; it changes nothing about how the article is reviewed, produced, or published.
Directive Publications is a fully open-access publisher, and open-access publishing is supported by article publication charges rather than reader subscriptions. Exact charges depend on the journal and are disclosed to authors at submission and available on request; we do not print a fee here. For the full fee framework — what the charge covers and when it applies — please see Publication Charges. This page explains the support available if that charge would be difficult or impossible for you to meet.
Support is available through three clearly defined routes. They are considered independently, and support may take the form of a full waiver (the entire charge is removed) or a partial reduction (part of the charge is discounted), depending on the circumstances.
Corresponding authors based in low-income and lower-middle-income economies are eligible for support. Eligibility on this route is assessed using recognized public country-income classifications (for example, World Bank income groupings) as an external reference framework. This ensures decisions are consistent, transparent, and not made on an ad-hoc basis.
Authors whose research is unfunded or self-funded — where no grant, institutional, departmental, or third-party funds are available to cover a publication charge — may request support on the basis of demonstrated hardship, regardless of country.
We also consider individual requests on their own merit. If your situation does not fit neatly into the routes above but you genuinely cannot cover the charge, you are welcome to explain your circumstances and we will assess the request fairly.
Eligibility is normally determined by the corresponding author's affiliation and country, since the corresponding author is our primary point of contact and typically manages any charge. For multi-author papers with a mix of affiliations, it is the corresponding author's circumstances that form the basis of the assessment. Where co-authors are based in different countries, tell us in your request and we will consider the team's overall situation when exercising discretion.
The most important rule is one of timing: request support at or before submission — not after your paper has been accepted. Requesting early lets us assess your circumstances calmly and separately from the review of your manuscript.
In some cases the corresponding author's affiliation and country may already indicate likely eligibility; even so, we encourage you to make your request explicitly, so that nothing is overlooked and we can confirm the appropriate level of support. Before you submit your manuscript, we recommend reading our Author Guidelines.
This is the single most important commitment on this page. A request for a waiver or discount — and whether it is granted or declined — never influences any editorial decision. It plays no part in whether a paper is sent for review, in the outcome of peer review, or in the decision to accept or reject.
Waiver and discount requests are handled administratively, entirely separately from editorial evaluation. Editors and reviewers are not informed of, and take no part in, fee or waiver correspondence. Our manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review, and our policies are aligned with the COPE Core Practices and follow the ICMJE Recommendations. Keeping fee decisions and scholarly decisions in strictly separate hands is how we honour those principles in practice. You can read more in our Editorial Policies and Publication Ethics.
Waived and discounted articles receive identical treatment to fully paid articles — no lesser service, and equally no faster or preferential handling. Every accepted article, regardless of what was paid, receives:
A waiver never buys a lesser experience, and a paid charge never buys a shortcut. Service is symmetrical for all authors.
Any information about financial need or hardship that you share in a request is treated confidentially. It is used solely to assess your waiver or discount and is not shared with editors, reviewers, or third parties, and it has no bearing on how your manuscript is evaluated.
Requests made at or before submission are the easiest to accommodate. A request made only during review or after acceptance may not be possible to accommodate, because our administrative and editorial processes are deliberately kept separate and much of the work is already underway by then. We do not attach a fixed number of days to a decision, but we aim to respond to the corresponding author promptly, and the outcome — full waiver, partial reduction, or the standard charge — is communicated directly to the corresponding author by email.
In certain defined circumstances a publication charge may be refundable. We do not restate those terms here; the authoritative conditions are set out in our Refund Policy, which governs all refund questions.
This page works alongside our other author-facing policies:
Wherever possible we make this information easy to find early in the process — whether you begin from one of our journals, the author guidelines, or the submission form — so that questions about affordability can be raised before you commit time to a submission.
To ask a question or submit a waiver or discount request, contact our editorial and administrative team at [email protected], or write to us at Directive Publications, 30 N Gould St, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. We treat every request seriously, confidentially, and on its merits.