Open Access: Author Fund

OA Fund (We are currently out of funds and will not be issuing awards until further notice)

Open Access (OA) Author Fund Pilot is designed to heighten the visibility and accessibility of LSU scholarship and to support faculty, staff, and graduate students who choose to publish in open access journals from fully open access publishers that require author-fees for accepted manuscripts. It is intended for authors with limited sources of funding for open access publication charges.

Awarding is done through a rolling process. Applicants will be reviewed within 10 business days. Everyone that meets the eligibility criteria is encouraged to apply.  The fund will award up to $2,000 to recipients to pay publisher author-fees. (We have increased the award from $1500 to $2000 to help keep pace with rising publisher charges.)

Author Eligibility

All faculty, graduate students, post-docs, and staff at the LSU Baton Rouge campus are eligible to apply.

Authors applying for funds along with the primary authors of the publications must be LSU employees or students. Preference is given to research or scholarship primarily conducted by LSU employees or students.

We expect researchers to exhaust other funding sources and to use appropriate research grant funds to pay publication charges. For example, the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation will fund open access publications as part of their research grants. For questions related to research funds and your application, email us at openaccess@lsu.edu.

Journal Eligibility

Authors are encouraged to consult with the OA Author Fund reviewers regarding the eligibility and quality of open access journals prior to submitting manuscripts:  openaccess@lsu.edu. 

Authors applying for the OA Author Fund must be publishing in peer-reviewed journals that are:

• published by fully open access publishers (publishes only open access journals, see a list of examples below)
• listed in the  Directory of Open Access Journals
• members of the  Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
• published in a fully open-access format based on a published schedule of article processing fees

OA Author Funds:

• cannot support reimbursements for any journal published by a “hybrid” publisher, such as Springer Nature, Oxford, Cambridge, Elsevier, Sage and Wiley because these publishers are still using a closed-access model of publishing for most of their journals. This policy is meant to support open access as a publishing model and not encourage publishers to create open journals just to profit from both subscriptions and open access publishing fees.
• cannot support reimbursements for placing articles in “hybrid” open-access journals, such as subscription-based journals that make some articles available after an author pays fees but continue to charge subscriptions and prevent open access to the rest of the journal.
• cannot support reimbursements for article processing fees that can otherwise be covered by a gift or grant from a foundation, institution or agency. In other words, if you have funding from another source that will cover APCs, you should use that source instead of requesting OA Author funds from LSU, to allow us to conserve the limited OA Author funding for authors who have no other options.

Examples of fully open access publishers:

• Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• eLife
• Frontiers
• PeerJ
• Copernicus Publications
• PsychOpen

Approval for OA Author funds is not limited to these publishers, but any applications including other publishers will be explored for meeting criteria before approval.

 Fund reviewers may also use other non-articulated factors when deciding whether a journal meets the quality criteria for funding.

Article Eligibility

Peer-reviewed articles submitted to an open access journal yet not already published are eligible. These will have the publication status of ready for submission, submitted for publication, or accepted for publication. Funds will not be provided for manuscripts that are still being written or that have been published prior to the request for funds.

Fund Cap, Disbursement, and Administration

Fund Cap

Funds may be used to pay article processing charges up to $2,000 per article. Color, page, or image charges are not eligible.

A requesting author may be awarded funding once a calendar year. 

Fund Disbursement

• Requests may be made upon article submission or immediately upon acceptance.
• Articles that are ready for submission to the journal and are awarded funds will have four months to complete the peer review process. If the paper is not accepted by the publisher or a PO not received for payment within four months of funding approval, the award will expire. The author may later reapply for funds.
• Funds are not transferable.  If the article funded is not accepted for publication, the award expires.
• Once funds have been approved, the requesting author may send the publisher's invoice to openaccess@lsu.edu or direct the journal to do so. 
• Funds may be paid only to publisher invoices. Individual authors will not be reimbursed or paid for retroactive publications.
• Funds will only be awarded directly to the publisher of the journal identified in the application.

If funds are encumbered for a submitted manuscript that is later not accepted, those funds will be released back to the OA Fund.

LSU Libraries administer and assess the program and reports to the Office of Academic Affairs. 

Review Process

Funding will be distributed through a rolling review process. If not awarded, an author will be notified. 

The fund is a limited resource intended to support open access publishing across the university. We expect researchers to request funding for open access publication from their funding agency if they can do so. If such funds are not available, we welcome your application.

Institutional Repository

LSU Libraries will upload the published version of each funded article to LSU Digital Commons, LSU's open access digital archive of the research, publications, data, and records of the LSU community. 

Acknowledgements

The structure of this program and language of this guide was taken with permission from the One University Open Access Author Fund at The University of Kansas. 

The journal eligibility was taken with permission from the Duke Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) Fund site.