2024 URI Open Access Fund Committee Final Report

"The URI Open Access Fund should be retired. The open access landscape is fundamentally different now than it was a decade ago. The Fund’s limited nature creates unreasonable expectations from URI faculty authors that the university will systematically fund APCs for their articles, which neither the OA Fund nor the university can meet, and this causes frustration. Open access publishing has advanced to the point that the OA Fund is not needed to “promote” open access. The OA Fund is simply not scalable. There is not enough money in the fund to meet needs, nor can there be. Rather than covering the APC expenses of a small number of URI faculty, OA Fund resources should be redirected toward efforts that will have greater impact....

Encourage URI faculty to make their articles open access by depositing their manuscripts in DigitalCommons@URI in compliance with the URI Open Access Policy..."