Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/Open Access Funding

How to fund Open Access?

A fundamental difference to the traditional closed access (or paywalled) models is that when publishing Open Access, costs of publication and dissemination are moved from the demand/reader side to the supply/author side. This however does not mean that authors need to pay Article or Book Processing Charges from their pockets.

In reality, these costs are covered either by funders of external research grants (such as Horizon Europe or The Swiss National Science Foundation) or by research performing institutions. In the former case, costs of Open Access publications are included in the budget of the funded project (see the example of SNSF here). In the latter case, universities and other research institutions have transformative agreements (see Swiss examples above) in place and in addition to them, also institutional Open Access publication funds. This however does not always fully cover the Open Access publication of each and every affiliated or loosely affiliated scholarly works. To mitigate gaps in the funding landscape, organisations like DARIAH ERIC have dedicated Open Access book publication grants in place. In yet another funding model, which is all probably the most sustainable one, academic institutions and their libraries pay in a shared pot to collectively fund Open Access publishing venues that are important for their communities and where their authors are free to publish. This way, these institutions take back ownership of and control over the publishing infrastructure instead of simply paying publication prices defined by for-profit publishers. The Open Library of Humanities is probably the best known example of them. [Swiss examples to be added.]

To gain up-to-date information of Open Access funding available for you or your research team, we recommend contacting your institutional library or your national research funder (SNSF, DFG, NWO etc.) for information.

In many cases, scholars without institutional affiliation and project funding or researchers coming from lesser resourced countries can apply for APC waivers.

For books, the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit curates a regularly updated list of available funding for the Open Access Publication of academic books across Europe here: https://oabooks-toolkit.org/lifecycle/10944589-planning-funding/article/9012512-overview-of-available-funding

Further information about Open Access book funding is available on the dedicated discussion board of the Open Access Book Network here: https://hcommons.org/groups/open-access-books-network/forum/topic/developments-for-open-access-book-funding-policies/