Unfortunately, the ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund is exhausted for the Fiscal Year 2022-2023. Authors in Cambridge, IOP, Company of Biologists, and American Chemical Society journals can continue to publish open access without fees through our transformative agreements. (Read more.) Please contact oafund@mail.pitt.edu with any questions about the status of the fund.
The venue of publication must be from an established Open Access publisher. For a journal, that means the publisher does not charge readers or their institutions for unfettered access to the peer-reviewed articles that it publishes. For other scholarly works, the publisher or imprint is fully open and does not charge readers or their institutions for access to the content that it publishes.
To be eligible, a publication 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
Have publicly available a standard fee schedule.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
Publications with a hybrid Open Access model or delayed Open Access model are not eligible. Any authors who are unsure as to whether or not a particular publication is eligible should contact the ULS prior to submitting an article for publication.
Eligible Authors: Funds are available for faculty, staff, postdoctoral associates, and students served by the ULS and the BARCO Law Library. This includes those at all of the University of Pittsburgh schools except the six schools in the health sciences: Dental Medicine, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Nursing, Medicine, Pharmacy, and Public Health. Any authors who are unsure as to whether they are an eligible author should contact the ULS prior to submitting their work for publication.
For authors in the Health Sciences… Eligibility for this program is limited to faculty, staff, students in schools supported by the University Library System (ULS) and the BARCO Law Library. Individuals only affiliated with the six schools of the Health Sciences are not eligible for this program.
Processing fees may include publication fees (charges levied on works 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.
Article Processing Charges are waived for University of Pittsburgh authors publishing in Cambridge journals when the following criteria apply:
To receive the waiver, make sure to register your account in Cambridge’s online submission system using your Pitt e-mail address and enter University of Pittsburgh as your affiliation. Then, select that you want to publish under one of the Open Access licenses. You do not need to apply for funding through the Author Fee Fund to receive this waiver. If you have any questions, please e-mail oafund@mail.pitt.edu. For more information about the Cambridge agreement, see our press release.
Unused Fund amounts do not roll over to future years. If the demand for funds exceeds expectations, publication charges will be paid to the publisher on behalf of an author on a first-come-first-served basis. Authors are eligible for use of the fund for up to $3,000 per fiscal year. Funds within this limit may be used for multiple publications through the fiscal year.
Once an author has a manuscript accepted by a qualifying publication and receives a statement or invoice for publication charges, she or he should submit that paperwork to the ULS using the online application form and e-mail the invoice to oafund@mail.pitt.edu. (Except for BioMed Central/Springer Open journals; applications should be made prior to submission of a BioMed Central/Springer Open journal). Payment will be made by the University directly to the publisher. Some publishers will bill the ULS directly; in this case we request that you still submit the application form before we will pay the publisher.
As an added service, the ULS will deposit a copy of funded works in the University of Pittsburgh’s institutional repository, D-Scholarship@Pitt. The placement of a work in the repository helps to build the collection of University of Pittsburgh–authored publications, supports the self-archiving arm of the Open Access movement, and gives the article an added element of preservation and discoverability.
We also ask that you consider adding an acknowledgement of the support provided by the Open Access Author Fee Fund: “[Article or Publication ]charges for this article were fully or partially paid by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh.”
