- Purpose of the Fund
- Journal/Publisher Requirements
- Eligible Authors
- Eligible Fees
- Fund Limits
- Applying for Funds
- Open Access Author Fund Committee
- Institutional Repository
The Libraries' Open Access Author Fund has been exhausted for fiscal year 2022-2023. Please check back after July 1 for future funding. If you have any questions about this, please contact Marian Armour-Gemmen at marian.armour-gemmen@mail.wvu.edu.
Purpose of the Fund
The West Virginia University Libraries are committed to providing open access to research for anyone anywhere. The Open Access Author Fund (OAAF) is intended as an aid to open access to scholarly content published by WVU authors.
Authors requesting fees for open access publications should consider the OAAF as a last resort when no other source of funding is available. The WVU Libraries encourage authors to include publication fees in grant requests whenever possible. This fund is not intended to replace grant funding nor any University funding such as the Eberly College Subvention Fund. Early career faculty and graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply for the OAAF.
Journal/Publisher Requirements
The primary venue of publication must be an established open-access journal, a journal that does not charge readers or their institutions for unfettered access to peer-reviewed articles. Articles submitted to hybrid journals will not be considered. A hybrid journal publishes both open access and subscription or paid articles. To be eligible, a journal must meet these additional requirements:
- Be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (unless the journal is too new for DOAJ eligibility) OR
- Be a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association or adhere to its Code of Conduct,
- Have publicly available a standard article fee schedule
Hybrid, a mix of open and paid articles, or delayed open-access journals are not eligible. You may consult Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities to find the extent of your journal’s open access. Cabell’s only covers these subject areas: business (accounting, marketing, economics & finance, management), education, psychology, nursing, health administration, and computer science & business information systems. If unsure about a journal meeting these criteria, contact the WVU Libraries prior to submitting an article for publication.
The OAAF will also consider funding for open access book chapters in fully open access books.
The West Virginia University Libraries have institutional memberships with a number of publishers and platforms resulting in no or discounted open access fees. For a full list and extent of help for authors, please see the open access research guide. Please consult the research guide first and then contact Marian Amour-Gemmen for information.
In addition, WVU Libraries has just signed a Read & Publish Agreement with a major publisher of academic journals, Cambridge University Press. This agreement allows WVU faculty to publish open access (OA) articles in Cambridge University Press journals with no article processing charges (APCs). Please see the complete listing of Cambridge University Press titles which allow open access articles or read further about benefits of this agreement .
Eligible Authors
Funds are available for faculty, staff, postdoctoral associates, and students served by the West Virginia University Libraries and its regional libraries.
Each applicant may only be funded once per fiscal year, regardless of the amount awarded.
Faculty may only be funded once each fiscal year as a first author. A faculty member can appear as a co-author on more than one submission, particularly on papers that have one of their graduate students as the first author.
Any authors who are unsure about whether they are an eligible author should contact Marian Armour-Gemmen prior to submitting an article for publication.
Eligible Fees
Open access author fees may include publication fees (charges levied on articles accepted for publication, including page charges). Eligible fees must be based on a publication’s standard fee schedule that is independent of the author’s institution. Reprint fees are not eligible. The subsidy is limited to $1,500 per article, regardless of the number of authors.
Fund Limits
Publication charges will be paid to the publisher on behalf of an author on a first-come-first-served basis. Once the fund is expended, there will be no more funds until the next fiscal year. The program is a pilot project, and for this reason in early years funding will be limited and will be disbursed to authors upon approval by the OAAF Committee and in the order in which they were received and approved.
The fund is closed for FY 2022/2023. Please revisit this page after July 2023.
Applying for Funds
Once an author has a manuscript accepted by a qualifying journal, he or she should immediately apply for open access funds using the application form. The OAAF Committee in the University Libraries will review the applications and vet and prioritize them based on criteria for eligibility, guidelines, and available funding. Authors will receive notification of decision via email within 3 business days. The decision of the Committee is final.
Open Access Author Fund Committee
The OAAF Committee represents all WVU research constituencies and is a mix of teaching faculty and librarians from across the Downtown, Evansdale, and Health Sciences campuses. Current members are:
Marian Armour-Gemmen, Evansdale Library, Chair
Wathiq Abdul-Razzaq, Physics and Astronomy Department
Vagner Benedito, Davis College, Division of Plant & Soil Sciences
Virginia Desouky, Education Coordinator, Health Sciences Library
Peter Giacobbi, College of Physical Activity and Sport Sciences, Joint Appointment
School of Public Health
George Kelley, Health Sciences
Jason Manning, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Jeff Werst, Science Librarian, Downtown Library
Institutional Repository
As an added service, the Libraries will deposit a copy of funded articles in the Research Repository @ WVU. The placement of an article in this institutional repository helps to build the collection of WVU–authored publications, supports the self-archiving arm of the open access movement, and gives the article an added element of preservation and discoverability.