Funding Available for Publishing Open Access Articles
Posted October 7, 2022 in General Collections News, JMU Libraries News, Open Education News
JMU Libraries and JMU Research and Scholarship have launched a new pilot program to help faculty and staff with the cost of open access article publication charges (a.k.a. article processing charges or APCs). This is great news for JMU researchers in any discipline who want to publish in scholarly, peer-reviewed open access (OA) journals!
Why open access?
Open access publishing not only broadens your readership and increases citations to your work, but also helps to contribute to a more equitable and sustainable model of scholarly publishing.
What are APCs?
Not all open access publishing requires article publishing charged (APC). However, many publishers of fully open journals charge authors to publish, instead of charging subscription fees. These fully open journals that charge APCs are called “Gold OA” journals. Fully open journals that do not charge APCs are called “Diamond OA” journals, and cover their costs through other mechanisms.
Not all APCs are created equal
While Gold OA journals use APCs to defray online publication and staffing costs, APCs are also required from journals that are subscription-based and allow for single articles to be made open access. These journals are called “hybrid” journals, since their content includes both paywalled and open access articles. Because the publishers of these journals are effectively collecting money twice—once through a subscription and then again through the APC—our OA APC pilot fund provides funding at a slightly lower amount for hybrid journals than it does for Gold OA journals.
Efforts towards equity
APCs can be expensive. They can prevent authors from publishing in open access journals. Removing barriers to information publication and access is a productive step towards more inclusive scholarly communications. However, if wealthy institutions are the only ones that can participate in creating open intellectual output, the corpus of open knowledge will not be representative of humanity.
JMU Libraries is working on several levels to make the scholarly communications ecosystem more open and equitable, and we are making incremental gains. Some fees are already eliminated, subsidized, or reduced due to the Libraries’ memberships, subscriptions, and participation in the VIVA consortium. Visit our Scholarly Communications guide to learn about our publisher agreements that reduce costs for authors to publish in open access journals.
Learn more
Visit our Open Access APC Fund Pilot page for details, including the application process and criteria.
Contact
Please contact Yasmeen Shorish, Director of Scholarly Communications Strategies, with any questions about publication fees, open access, or this pilot program.