Membership
An optional publisher program with published fees and a published discount on article processing charges. It is an administrative arrangement, and it stands outside the editorial process entirely.
- Run by
- Open Access Pub
- Term
- Annual, except where stated
- Applies to
- Article processing charges
What membership is, in plain terms
Editorial decisions are independent of fees, services, memberships and roles. Membership confers no advantage in the review or acceptance of a member’s own manuscripts, and a member’s submission is read exactly as any other submission is.
Membership supports the publisher’s open-access publishing and reduces what a member pays when one of their manuscripts is accepted. The concrete terms are the fee and the discount; everything else about how a manuscript is handled is unchanged by it.
Membership is separate from the Article Processing Charge itself, which is set out on the Article Processing Charges page.
Published fees and discounts
| Tier | Fee | Discount on article processing charges |
|---|---|---|
| Practitioner | USD 189 per year | 15% |
| Pain Center, institutional | USD 949 per year | 25% for affiliated authors |
| Distinguished Fellow | USD 1,399 one time | 30% |
The discount is applied to the invoice raised after acceptance. It changes the amount payable and nothing else.
How to apply
[email protected], with your professional affiliation and the tier you are interested in.
The publisher’s membership staff answer directly. Membership applications are administered entirely within the publisher’s office, and the editorial file that reaches an editor carries the manuscript and its declarations alone.
Manuscript questions go to the editorial office at [email protected], which is a separate address for a separate purpose.
Membership and editorial assessment run separately
Review, revision and the decision itself are handled by editors and reviewers who work from the manuscript.
Screening, reviewer selection, the number of review rounds, the time a manuscript takes and the decision reached are all determined by the work and by the journal’s published criteria.
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.