The fund is exhausted for FY24 and we are no longer accepting new requests. Please read the important message below about the future status of the fund. Please note that FY24 is the last year we at the University Library System will be supporting APCs (article processing charges). Instead, we will focus our support for open scholarship in more equitable and financially feasible areas. Please contact oafund@mail.pitt.edu with any questions about the status of the fund.
Dear researcher,
Thank you for your interest in our Open Access Author Fee Fund. Please note that FY24 is the last year we at the University Library System will be supporting APCs (article processing charges). Instead, we will focus our support for open scholarship in more equitable and financially feasible areas.
The Open Access Author Fee Fund has supported, on average, 15 articles a year out of a total of ~11,000* publications annually from Pitt authors (*Web of Science.) Some APCs can go up to $8,000 per single article. The paying of APCs often constitutes “double-dipping” by commercial publishers; we pay annual subscription fees for access to journals and APCs (paid by you or by us) on top of that. In addition, providing support author by author and article by article is not sustainable long-term. Therefore, after the 2023-24 fiscal year, we will discontinue the Author Fee Fund while continuing to increase our investment in other Open Access strategies.
We believe the funds previously used to support APCs can better advance our goal of more open, equitable, and academy-centered outcomes for scholarship by being applied to the series of new publisher agreements the library is signing. These agreements allow ANY Pitt corresponding author (not just the average of 15 authors that the Author Fee Fund supported each year) to publish Open Access without added cost to you, the researcher, in the 550 journals for which we currently have agreements. Importantly, these agreements provide read access to articles in these titles to the global scholarly community. In addition, we are continuing to invest in community-owned open infrastructure and in digitizing our special collections for access for everyone anywhere in the world. These three ways of supporting open scholarship—subscribing to new Open licenses, investing in open infrastructure, and continuing to digitize special collections available online represent much more equitable and financially feasible support for open scholarship.
We do want to help facilitate your Open Access publishing efforts. Please tell us the title(s) and publisher(s) you are hoping to publish with so that we can be sure we are pursuing open publication agreements with them in the future. We also encourage you to talk to your liaison librarian to explore your options for publishing Open Access or to contact oa-fund@pitt.edu with any questions.
