York University Open Access Author Fund - Open Access Publishing Toolkit - CampusGuides at York University

All York, faculty, graduate students, staff, post-docs, emeriti, and visiting scholars who have had a peer-reviewed article accepted to an Open Access journal that meets the funding criteria.

Where an article has multiple authors, the first author must be a York affiliated researcher.

York will fund one publicaton per year for each researcher.

Only researchers with no other funding source to cover APCs will be given funding.

What does the fund cover?

The fund will cover Author Processing Charges (also called author’s fees or page fees) for articles in pure Open Access journals. An Open Access journal:

a) does not charge subscription fees for any of its content. All articles are immediately available online at no cost to the reader.

b) is not a Hybrid Journal. These are publications under subscription control for which authors of individual articles can pay an “open choice” fee to make their papers freely available to any reader. The Libraries will not cover the “open choice” fee. 

c) does not have embargoes that limit Open Access to content for a specific time period after publication, if it is longer than the publication timeline required by the funding source. Listings of journals providing delayed OA are available at PubMed Central and Highwire Press.

Other conditions: 

A copy of the funded paper will also be made available through York Space immediately after initial publication. York Space is York University's institutional repository. Follow the step-by-step guide to creating an account, learning about your publisher's policy, and depositing your research article and materials in YorkSpace

The Open Access Fund aims to encourage authors to retain copyright so they can release their work under Creative Commons licensing. For that reason, another condition of the Open Access Fund is that the journal must allow the authors to retain copyright. 

Does York subsidize open access?

York University Libraries have been supporting OA initiatives through various channels since 2006. In 2009, a formal proposal was submitted to the University Librarian outlining the suggested mechanisms by which OA support could proceed. Largely, our support is reflected in the following initiatives:

• Biomed Central
• Bioline
• Hindawi
• Open Medicine
• PLoS

The original proposal is currently under review and will reflect the work that is underway compiling the necessary documentation for York's submission to become a Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) member. COPE is based on the premise that universities already subsidize the costs of subscription journals by subscribing to them. By subsidizing article processing fees for OA journals, universities and funding agencies can provide equitable support for the business model for open access journals placing the subscription-fee and processing-fee models on a more level playing field.

COPE commits a university to 'the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.'"