Library fund for Open Access and Generation Open

The fund has been established since August 2013. We recognised that good research would not always receive support from major funders to pay article processing charges (APCs) and that this was potentially unfair, especially to early career researchers. We also wanted to ensure that all researchers can publish in the most appropriate venue, as described in our Open Access Policy. If ‘most appropriate’ means a fully open access journal that requires payment of an APC (as opposed to a ‘hybrid’ journal where APCs are an option), then we should provide funds to support this choice. To date we have processed about 13 APCs for researchers who have no other source of funding, all to support science-related article publication in Biology, Computer Science, Medicine and Physics. The science bias is partly due to the greater number of open access model publications in these disciplines. But this is likely to change with the introduction of these models into Humanities and Social Science where progress has been slower. The level of individual APC is significantly lower (avg £1,257) compared to publication in hybrid journals and this has helped continue the fund into 2014-15.

The University has supported Open Access for some time, firstly by mandating Etheses deposit into Research@StAndrews:FullText in 2006. We encourage all our researchers to consider publishing Open Access, whether funded or not, and the Library will continue to support this choice through its fund*. Corresponding authors must be a member of staff to be eligible.

*Library fund for Open Access