Physical Review Physics Education Research (PRPER) covers the full array of experimental and theoretical research relating to the teaching and learning of physics and astronomy. PRPER is the only fully open access journal for physics education research. Because it is published as fully open access, the journal does not receive funds from libraries to support publication costs. Thus, it is necessary for journal authors to pay an article processing charge (APC) in order to publish their articles.

We realize that current APCs are prohibitive for some authors. Thus, PRPER has a procedure for authors to request full or partial fee waivers. Once your article is accepted for publication, you will receive an email from PRPER with information about how to request a fee waiver. Fee waiver requests are not processed by the PRPER Editors and the Editors are not informed about who has requested or received fee waivers. Having fee waiver requests after acceptance and hidden from the Editorial staff is done to avoid financial considerations having any impact on publication decisions.

Fee waivers may be requested by authors who are unable to pay the full APCs. We do ask authors to consider all possible sources of funding available prior to requesting a fee waiver. Many institutions have such funds available. In requesting a fee waiver you will need to explain why a waiver is needed and what steps you have taken to seek funding. Authors from countries for which the American Physical Society (APS) offers free online access to its subscription journals are automatically eligible for fee waivers. A list of such countries can be found at http://ejds.ictp.it/ejds/.