Criteria for Institutional Membership in Open Access Initiatives

Background

Every year the NC State University Libraries receives inquiries from researchers regarding institutional membership in open access publishing initiatives. Learn more about the open access (OA) publishing agreements that are currently in place.

Typically inquiries arise when researchers submit manuscripts for publication in open access journals and are asked to pay an article processing charge (APC). Instead of charging for access to their publications, some open access publishers rely on the APC, which can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, to recover their operating costs. Because many researchers do not receive large grants that could help pay for the cost of disseminating their research results, they look for assistance to pay for the APC. Institutional membership in some open access initiatives allows for an institution’s researchers to receive a discount or full payment of the APC.

We use the following criteria in deciding whether to become institutional members of such open access publishing initiatives:

  • The membership should allow us to break even in the dollar amount that we spend on the membership relative to the amount that our researchers save on the article charges
  • The initiative must be financially sustainable for the foreseeable future
  • There must be several options for membership that accommodate the uncertainty in our budgets for supporting open access initiatives
  • The subjects covered by the journals must be relevant to our researchers
  • Membership should send a clear message of support for making research more accessible and allow us to influence the academic publishing industry in innovative and sustainable directions
  • The initiative should assist authors who need to meet funding agency public access mandates
  • The journals should meet standards of impact, timeliness and indexing expected by our researchers

Learn more about open access publishing options on our scholarly sharing guide and our open research guide.

Librarian(s)