A Crowdfunding Approach to Open Access Publishing | IGI Global

"Many publishers, including IGI Global, are rather flexible in the manner in which payments are collected for article processing charges (APCs), chapter processing charges (CPCs), and book processing charges (BPCs). Because payment isn’t collected until after the work has gone through the full peer review process and been accepted for publication, this gives authors and editors at times weeks, or sometimes months, to work out the OA funding arrangements. Many authors don’t realize that they don’t need to have all of their OA funding coming from one single funding source, but rather they can take a crowdfunding approach and secure multiple funding sources for their research. This could be a blend of OA funding coming by way of national or international funding bodies, OA publishing agreements, institutional funds and/or open access memberships, among many other sources. It’s a concept that is not terribly new but is often not thought of.

For instance, if an editor is looking to publish a full OA book, a portion of the funding may come from their institution’s library while the other portion is secured from a government funding agency. The same goes for an OA journal special issue. A portion of the papers in the special issue may be funded through an OA agreement and the remainder of the papers may be self-funded by the individual authors of the papers. This concept can also be applied to the retrospective opening of publication projects so that work previously published under standard access can be converted to OA...."