Open Access Authors Fund
The Open Access Authors Fund is designed to pay the fees charged by publishers for articles to be published in Open Access (OA) journals. These fees are often referred to as "author fees", "author payments", "open access charges", "article processing fees", or "submission fees" (there are a wide variety of terms).
The Open Access Authors Fund, the first of its kind in Canada, has $100,000 CAN. It began in fiscal year 2008/2009 and is a multi-year commitment. The fund is paid for by Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary.
Application Procedure
Applicants should first read the criteria below and then complete the application form. Please also see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
The fund is open to all faculty, staff, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers at the University of Calgary. At this point, adjunct are not eligible.
Applications will be judged as quickly as possible. Under most circumstances, applicants will know whether or not their funding request has been approved within five working days.
There is no limit to the number of applications an individual can make during the year. One application covers one accepted paper.
As of January 1, 2009, applicants should exhaust other funding sources that can be used to pay for submission fees before applying to the Open Access Authors Fund. If an alternate funding source is available that permits payment of submission fees (e.g. a grant), this source must be used before applying to the Fund.
Payment will be made directly by Libraries and Cultural Resources to the publisher. Applicants should keep all relevant paperwork and correspondence with the publisher.
Peer-reviewed articles that have been accepted for publication in:
a) Journals which are fully Open Access. That is, all of the content of the entire journal is freely available online immediately upon payment of the submission fee. Examples of publishers with suites of fully Open Access journals that charge submission fees include: BioMed Central (BMC), Co-Action Publishing, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, PhysMath Central (PMC), Public Library of Science (PLoS) and Dove Medical Press.
Fully Open Access journals from publishers who have few such journals are also eligible. For example, Oxford University Press has Nucleic Acids Research, DNA Research, and Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
b) Journals which are not fully Open Access but which allow individual articles to be made freely available online immediately upon payment of the submission fee. These are known as "hybrid" Open Access journals. To be eligible for funding in this category, the publisher must plan to make (in the next subscription year) reductions to the institutional subscription prices based on the number of Open Access articles in those journals. To date, the only publishers that have done this are Oxford University Press, which has reduced subscription fees for the hybrid journals in its Oxford Open program, and the American Institute of Physics, which has done the same for its Author Select program. Other publishers may follow this lead in the future.
To find out more about Open Access journals, two good sources are the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Sherpa Romeo list of hybrid journal programs. There is also a list of publisher submission fees here.
Institutional Repository
As an added service, Libraries and Cultural Resources will deposit a copy of funded articles in the University of Calgary's institutional repository, known as D-Space. The placement of an article in the repository helps to build the collection of University of Calgary-authored publications, supports the "Green" or self-archiving arm of the Open Access movement, and gives the article an added element of preservation. Authors who do not want their articles added to the repository should indicate this on the application form.
For further questions or comments, please contact:
Andrew Waller Serials Librarian Collections and Technical Services Libraries and Cultural Resources MLB 402B waller@ucalgary.ca (403) 220-8133 voice (403) 284-2109 faxor
Helen Clarke Head, Collections Services Collections and Technical Services Libraries and Cultural Resources MLB 402A hclarke@ucalgary.ca (403) 220-3796 voice (403) 284-2109 faxSee also the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and the press release for the Open Access Authors Fund.
Last updated: 2009/09/028