Financing model

Traffic Safety Research is a Fair Open Access journal, meaning that all incomes are used exclusively to sustain its daily operation and strategic development (no profit intended).

The TSR journal receives some crucial services, such as web-hosting, DOI registration, and plagiarism control through support from the libraries of the Lund University, the Delft University of Technology, and the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute.

However, our ambition to keep the highest standards in academic publishing implies additional costs. These cover:

  • Copyediting and typesetting, including conversion of all manuscripts to JATS XML, a highly structured machine-readable text format, currently the ‘golden standard’ of academic publishing
  • Subscriptions to special software services
  • Membership in strategically important organizations, such as Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
  • Education of the journal staff
  • Journal promotion activities.

The TSR's long-term vision is to become a truly fair publisher by making the journal free at any point of use both for authors and readers, while the costs being covered through general long-term sponsorship agreements (see p. 4 in the Fair Open Access principles). While some work in this direction has been done, we are not fully there yet.

Currently, there are two main sources to financially sustain the TSR journal:

  • production fees
  • support from sponsor organizations.

Publication fees

The authors of accepted manuscripts are asked to pay a production fee. The fee is kept intentionally low and is directly based on the upfront cost to prepare an ‘average’ TSR article for publication. Currently, the production fee is:

  • SEK 5 800 (≈ EUR 500†).

† Check the current exchange rates here.

Authors from the following countries are eligible for a fee waiver (eligibility is determined by the country of the main affiliation of the first author):

Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyz Republic, Lao PDR, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Micronesia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Rwanda, Samoa, São Tomé and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vietnam, West Bank and Gaza, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe‡.

‡ The list is based on the World Bank's country classification by income, with the borderline drawn between upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income. Since the list is not static, it is recommended to always check your country's status for the current year at the World Bank's web page.

Authors affiliated with a TSR sponsor organisation should enquire whether their publication is covered by a special agreement. The eligibility is determined by the first author and his/her main affiliation.

Note: No fees are applied to the submissions completed prior to 1 January 2025 or done through the special submission tracks agreed on prior to this date (ICTCT 2024, RSS 2024, and CARSP/ICTCT 2025). If you are not sure, please, reach out to editor@tsr.international for clarifications.

Sponsor organizations

An organization may become a TSR sponsor by subscribing to cover publications costs for a certain number of articles per year. The following sponsorship levels are available:

  • Double-platinum sponsor (20 articles): EUR 10 000
  • Platinum sponsor (10 articles): EUR 5 000
  • Golden sponsor (7 articles): EUR 3 500
  • Silver sponsor (5 articles): EUR 2 500
  • Bronze sponsor (3 articles): EUR 1 500.

Sponsorship is usually associated with a special agreement regarding publications by authors affiliated with the sponsoring organization. Special agreements deal with the article production costs only; during the review stage, the editors apply the same quality criteria to all submissions.

The current list of the TSR sponsors can be found here.

In case you are interested to become a sponsor, please get in contact with the journal editorial team.