Open Access Publication


Open Access

This publication is a hybrid journal, allowing either Traditional manuscript submission or Open Access (author-pays OA) manuscript submission. Upon submission, if you choose to have your manuscript be an Open Access article, you commit to pay the $2645 OA fee if your manuscript is accepted for publication in order to enable unrestricted public access. Any other application charges, such as overlength page charge, will be billed separately once the manuscript formatting is complete but prior to the publication. If you would like your manuscript to be a Traditional submission, your article will be available to qualified subscribers and purchasers via IEEE Xplore. No OA payment is required for Traditional submission. 

Open Access article processing charge (APC): US$2645 for articles submitted in 2025.  

  • EMB members receive a 15% discount.
  • IEEE Members receive a 5% discount 
  • IEEE Society Members receive a 20% discount 
  • Discounts cannot be combined 
  • Discounts do not apply to undergraduate and graduate students 
  • Information about IEEE’s Low and Lower-middle Income Country Program is available 

Some institutions offer assistance for open access funding. Check our institutional partners list to see if yours is one. 

Page Charges 

Upon acceptance of a manuscript for publication, the author(s) or their company or institution will be asked to pay a charge to cover part of the cost of publication of a paper that is below the page limit, as noted below. The page charge for up to 8 pages is voluntary. 

The page limits are: 

  • Regular paper – eight pages; 
  • Communication – three pages; 
  • Letter – four pages; 
  • Review paper – fifteen pages. 

The author(s )or their affiliated institution are required to pay a mandatory overlength page fee for pages above the page limit: 

  • @$250/page for the first two overlength pages 
  • @$350/page for each of the remaining overlength pages. 

By submitting a manuscript to TBME, the author(s) signify their acceptance of the requirement to pay mandatory page charges. The Page Charge form can be found here. The Publisher holds the right to withhold publication of the current submission or any future submissions from the author(s) if this charge is not honored. To avoid incurring mandatory page charges, the author(s) are strongly advised to practice economy in the original manuscript submission and restraint in preparation of the final manuscript following peer review. Additional materials may be included as online supplementary materials after peer reviews. 

EMBS Now Offers Discounted Open Access Publishing

Transactions on Biomedical Engineering now offers publication in Open Access! Submit to the Journal that maintains review integrity and quality of publishing. 

Link to IEEE Open Access: 

Frequently Asked Questions

  • If the publication charges for over-length paper, this charge will be applicable for all articles published, whether open access or traditional. For both open access submissions and traditional submissions, this charge is not calculated until the article is ready for release. This charge is therefore requested towards the end of the production process and not at acceptance when the open access fee will be requested. Therefore, the total cost to publish an open access article in an IEEE journal will include the author processing fee plus any applicable over-length paper charge. Authors will not be asked to pay voluntary page charge for an open access submission.

  • The new open access publication model allows authors to select from two licensing options: the new IEEE Open Access Publishing Agreement (OAPA) or the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

    The OAPA allows authors to transfer copyright to IEEE, thereby empowering IEEE to protect the work against copyright infringement or plagiarism. The OAPA broadens IEEE’s definition of user rights. Users are permitted to copy the work, as well as translate it or use it for text mining, as long as the usage is for non-commercial purposes.

    A CC BY license allows authors to retain copyright in the work, but also carries very broad rights for end users. For instance, end users may reuse the work and must always credit the original author. But the end user does not have to obtain permission from the author to reuse the work, even for commercial purposes or to create derivative works.

    IEEE will make exceptions for authors who have special requirements from their funding agencies to publish their OA articles with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Two such funding agencies are the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils of the United Kingdom (RCUK), both of which require authors to use the CC BY license. IEEE will accept use of the CC BY license in these cases. Authors with a funding requirement to use the CC BY license should not sign the OACF, but instead should request a CC BY license.

  • There is some content within IEEE Xplore that is labeled as free. This content is typically not technical in nature, e.g. tables of contents, covers, advertisements, etc. This content is available to all within IEEE Xplore and it is not supported by author processing fees.

    Open access is content that is technical in nature, supported by author processing fees, and available to all.

  • No. All IEEE journals, transactions, and letters have the same high standard of peer review for all content submitted, regardless of open access status.

    In addition, IEEE’s new open access, multi-disciplinary journal, IEEE Access, and fully open access topical journals will draw on technical communities for peer reviewers and apply the same care in peer review to ensure that the best possible articles are published.

  • Readers will continue to access IEEE-supported content through the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Open access articles will be labeled as open access and available to all readers, regardless of their subscription base.

  • Authors of articles in most IEEE journals, whether open access or traditional, will receive a copy of their article through the IEEE Author Gateway during the production process. The copy will be clearly labeled as suitable for posting according to IEEE policy.

    The IEEE Author Gateway is the same web page that most authors have visited to retrieve and review their author page proof prior to final publication of their article.

    If a journal does not use the IEEE Author Gateway, authors will need to work with their IEEE production staff contact to obtain a copy of the article for posting.