Undoubtedly the ability for authors to find funding for their open access (OA) work is one of the biggest challenges of the OA publishing movement. In the absence of revenue, publishers must charge OA processing charges in order to recoup the costs of producing and hosting the work. At present, the vast majority of OA content is still being funded by the authors themselves, and oftentimes it’s because they don’t realize the different approaches that they can take to obtain funding or that the funding doesn’t have to just come from one single source.
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Diversify Your Funding
Many publishers, including IGI Global, are rather flexible in the manner in which payments are collected for article processing charges (APCs), chapter processing charges (CPCs), and book processing charges (BPCs). Because payment isn’t collected until after the work has gone through the full peer review process and been accepted for publication, this gives authors and editors at times weeks, or sometimes months, to work out the OA funding arrangements. Many authors don’t realize that they don’t need to have all of their OA funding coming from one single funding source, but rather they can take a crowdfunding approach and secure multiple funding sources for their research. This could be a blend of OA funding coming by way of national or international funding bodies, OA publishing agreements, institutional funds and/or open access memberships, among many other sources. It’s a concept that is not terribly new but is often not thought of.
For instance, if an editor is looking to publish a full OA book, a portion of the funding may come from their institution’s library while the other portion is secured from a government funding agency. The same goes for an OA journal special issue. A portion of the papers in the special issue may be funded through an OA agreement and the remainder of the papers may be self-funded by the individual authors of the papers. This concept can also be applied to the retrospective opening of publication projects so that work previously published under standard access can be converted to OA.
Starting a Crowdfunding Campaign
There are a number of crowdfunding platforms that authors and editors can use to generate funding for their publication projects – examples include:
Kickstarter and
Unglue.it, which are specifically designed to engage readers and provide funding to support publications.
It’s also not just researchers working together to get their publications crowdfunded, but libraries are also coming together to pool their financial resources within a crowdfunding approach to share the costs of transitioning monographs to OA.
It is always recommended that authors find out if their institution is part of an OA Agreement before proceeding with seeking out other OA funding. Libraries play such an integral part in progressing OA research, and IGI Global is continually partnering with institutions and their libraries to form various agreements that can mutually benefit all parties involved:
Here are a few common OA funding resources that provide additional information on country funding, OA standards, and more.
- Sherpa Juliet is a searchable database of research funders' OA policies.
- The Open Access Directory maintains a list of institutional funds for OA publishing.
- SPARC maintains a list of North American universities and university libraries with OA funds.
Related Resources of Interest:
About IGI Global
Founded in 1988 and headquartered in Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA with a subsidiary office (IGI Science and Technology, Ltd.), operating out of Beijing, China, IGI Global is an independent medium sized academic publisher committed to facilitating the discovery of pioneering research that enhances and expands the body of knowledge available to the global research community. Working in close collaboration with expert researchers and professionals from leading institutions, IGI Global disseminates quality content across 350+ topics in 11 core subject areas, including business, computer science, education, engineering, healthcare, social sciences, and more. All these publications have been contributed by over 150,000+ industry-leading researchers and experts worldwide, ensuring that each title contains the most emerging and timeliest research. To learn more about IGI Global, click here.
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