New Open Access fund at the Northwestern University Library | Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation

"The Northwestern University Library recently announced the pilot of an open access fund that will be used to reimburse members of the Northwestern community up to $3000 in one year for fees incurred through publishing in an open access publication if they do not have other sources of funding to cover the fees. The purpose of this fund is to support researchers who want to publish in an open access publication that meets the 'gold' open access standard, meaning that articles are immediately available for free to readers. Gold publications place no limitation on the immediate availability of material they publish, but to make this model economically feasible, some journals (studies estimate between 18-33%) charge an article-processing fee, sometimes called an article or author processing charge or APC for short. This is a cost that the author must absorb. This cost can be prohibitive for an author who does not have another source of funds to cover the processing fee. The goal of this new fund is to help alleviate the cost to the Northwestern author while making the publication available to all. The pilot will run the length of the current fiscal year after which its effectiveness will be evaluated. A number of other research libraries have reported success in their efforts to support open access publishing in this manner. For a list of institutions that have implemented open access funds see http://sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/fundsinaction.pdf ..."