W&M Libraries launches OA funding assistance

Posted on
January 31, 2022

Announcement, annoucement, annooooouuuucement! Or Extra Extra Hear All About It! (depending on your persuasion and generational tendency).

W&M Libraries is incredibly pleased to share that we have set aside funds ($100K in funds to be precise) to support faculty, students, and staff who want to publish their work open access!

As you are well aware, publishers are requesting that authors and researchers pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) to support open access publishing. These APCs vary widely, with some as high as $11K (see Nature) and others as low as a couple hundred. Often these charges come directly from the researcher’s pocket, but sometimes they can be covered using grant funds. If you find that there is an option to publish OA and you want to take it, but don’t have deep pockets, W&M Libraries would like to help.

This wonderful funding opportunity was brought about because money that was originally paid to Elsevier for a very expensive Big Deal Journal package was refunded when we were allowed to select the journals that were most useful for our campus and discontinue usage of the remainder. This fund allows our faculty, staff, and students to increase the reach and impact of their work, and we are incredibly excited to support our campus community in this way.

The Terms and Conditions of funding are as follows: All William & Mary faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate) who are currently enrolled or employed at W&M are eligible. Funds are available to underwrite article processing charges (APCs) for scholarly peer-reviewed articles accepted for publication in open access journals. The publisher must be a member of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) or comply with a similar Code of Conduct. OA journals should be registered in an open access directory such as the Directory of Open Access Journals or Sherpa/Romeo.

Support is not available if any of the authors have current funding from agencies that allow allocations for OA fees (e.g. NIH, NSF, Gates Foundation, and the like) that supported the research upon which the article is based. Funding is limited and will be disbursed to authors upon approval and in the order in which they were received. Invoices for funded articles must be received by the Library within 120 days of the award notification. Otherwise, the funds will be returned to W&M Libraries and the author(s) must reapply.

Additional information about the application can be found HERE or HERE. Questions can be directed to Rosie Liljenquist, Publishing and OA Librarian, at rliljenquist@wm.edu.

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