Publication in The Urologist was free of charge in both directions: readers paid nothing to read, and authors paid nothing to publish. That is unusual in open access, where the cost of production is normally moved onto the author as an article processing charge. The journal avoided that trade-off because it was carried by its publisher.
Who paid for the journal
The editorial policies state it plainly: thanks to the support of the Association of Italian urologists, publication in The Urologist is completely free of charge. AURO.it funded the editorial platform, the copy editing of accepted manuscripts and the hosting of the full text files — including colour reproduction of photographs, which commercial publishers routinely bill to the author.
What the sponsorship covered
- Submission, peer review and editorial handling of every manuscript.
- Copy editing for grammar, punctuation, print style and format after acceptance.
- Colour figures, large data sets and video material, at no cost to the author.
- Permanent open access to the published version under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.
- Deposit of the journal in the LOCKSS network so participating libraries could keep their own archives.
Why it matters for citation
A sponsored journal carries no financial incentive to accept a paper. Acceptance rates were governed by the screening rules described in the peer review process, not by a revenue target — a point worth making when the archive is assessed years after the last issue.
Commercial relationships
The journal did not sell advertising space on its pages and did not run sponsored supplements. Where an article studied a named commercial product, the product appears in the article title and the affiliation of the authors is recorded in the author index, so a reader can judge the relationship for themselves.
The site as it is now
The same arrangement governs what was added after the journal closed. The Italian pharmacopoeia and condition pages carry no advertising, no sponsored entries and no affiliate links: nothing on this site earns a commission if a reader buys a medicine, and no manufacturer has paid for, reviewed or approved a single line of those pages. Prices are quoted as market reference figures and link to no seller. The sources behind each sheet are declared in how the sheets are written.
The association itself is described on auro.it; contact details for its secretariat are on the contact page.