Publishing open allows your work to be more impactful because subscription-based journals cost a fee to access which is either paid by the reader or by a library or institution. Open Access (OA) means anyone can read the work without payment and the cost of producing the work is covered in a different way.
Often, commercial publishers will turn to the author to cover costs when the authors desires to make their work open. In the commercial scholarly journal industry, these fees are typically referred to as Article Processing Charges (APCs) or open access fees. Here are some options for funding your open access article:
Each of the boxes below offer information to help with funding to make your article open for readers.
Many funders, both public and private, will fund APCs for publications resulting from your grant-funded research. Before writing funding into your grant proposal you will need to do some research. Identify some journals in your field that could be possible places for publication and record the names of the journals and the costs for open access publication in each. From this information you can get a range of costs to include in your grant. You will also want to know or have an estimate of how many journal articles you want to publish.
An example of writing funding in to a grant proposal taken from Simon Fraser University Scholarly Publishing :
I expect to publish [number] peer-reviewed journal articles based on the research directed under this grant. Sample journals in my field that are possible places for publication include : [journals]. Article processing charges for these journals currently range in cost from [$xx.xx-$xx.xx]. Therefore, I am requesting [$xx.xx] in funding to cover the expected APC costs for peer-reviewed journal articles from this grant.
Helpful Links:
University Libraries partners with the following publishers and OhioLINK to offer coverage of some types of open access (OA) fees through our subscription agreements. These discounts and fee waivers are all submitted at the time of your manuscript submission.
Many publishers have agreements with organizations, institutions, and funders to discount or provide funding for the APCs or OA fees for their journals. If you or a co-authors are a member of a listed organization or institutions or your research is funded by a listed organization, you may be eligible for this funding.
Ohio University's Research & Sponsored Programs offers limited funding for APCs, among other things, through the Faculty Research Support Program.
Some of Ohio University's colleges offer funding for their faculty. Contact your Associate Dean for Research to find out if your college has any support or APCs or OA fees.
The Libraries currently do not have funds for individual Ohio University researcher open access publication fees. Funds for these types of charges from library budgets tend to be quickly depleted by STEM fields, making them unsustainable and furthering library budget inequities across the disciplines. From a philosophical perspective, as the Libraries struggle to sustain our collections with flat or declining budgets and high inflation, it is difficult to justify directing library resources (over and above subscription fees) to many of these same publishers asking for APCs to make our faculty’s articles open. Alternatively, we support the transformative read and published deals mentioned in Option 2 above and limited investments in innovative publishing models such as Open Library of Humanities.
While not an actual funding option, one way to make your research available freely to all readers is to take advantage of (negotiate if necessary), your rights as an author. Most publication agreements allow you to place a version of your article in a repository. Typically, these agreements allow you to place the final accepted version of your peer reviewed article without the publisher's formatting. Many researchers place these copies in a disciplinary repository or an institutional repository, like the OHIO Open Library.
The OHIO Open Library is a publicly-accessible repository providing open access and worldwide exposure to the scholarly, research, and creative works of Ohio University faculty, staff, and students.
If you have university-affiliated content you would like to make more available (open access articles, university publications, datasets, multimedia, etc.), please email ohioopenlibrary@ohio.edu with any questions or requests.
To learn more about understanding and securing your rights as an author, review An Introduction to Copyright Resources for Authors by SPARC. For more information about the OHIO Open Library check out the OHIO Open Library Information Page.