Research Guides: Open Access & Scholarly Communication: Open Access Projects and Partnerships

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Scholars' Bank is our Institutional Repository that holds pre- and post-prints of work by UO scholars, from faculty author's accepted manuscripts to the work of undergraduate research award winners.

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The University of Oregon Libraries are involved in many Open Access publishing projects, and also partner to support many more outside of the UO Libraries.

Open Access at the University of Oregon

UO Article Processing Charge Award Fund
The OA-APC Fund is intended to support high quality open access publishing by the UO community.
Open Access Publishing at UO
Learn more about current open access journals supported by the UO Libraries and how you could start your own OA journal.
Faculty Scholars' Bank
Deposit your work in Scholars' Bank, the UO's institutional repository, and guarantee that it will be accessible to a world-wide readership.

UO Supported Open Access Memberships

The UO Libraries has selectively invested in supporting open access initiatives through memberships. Some memberships come with a discount on author fees for UO scholars; please contact your subject specialist if you have questions about potential benefits. Here are our current memberships:

ACM
University of Oregon has a transformative agreement with ACM, meaning that UO authors don't pay any APCs.
ArXiv
Open access to 1,444,269 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics
BioMed Central / SpringerOpen
A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC series.

HathiTrust digital library This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Current UO students, faculty and staff should log into HathiTrust as the "University of Oregon". Additional functions, such as the ability to download the whole book are available only to users of member libraries. Using HathiTrust.

Knowledge Unlatched
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) offers free access to scholarly content for every reader across the world. Our online platform provides libraries worldwide with a central place to support Open Access models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.
Nucleic Acids Research
(Ended in 2022 due to changed terms)
Nucleic Acids Research ( NAR ) publishes the results of leading edge research into physical, chemical, biochemical and biological aspects of nucleic acids and proteins involved in nucleic acid metabolism and/or interactions. It enables the rapid publication of papers under the following categories: Chemistry and synthetic biology; Computational biology; Gene regulation, chromatin and epigenetics; Genome integrity, repair and replication; Genomics; Molecular biology; Nucleic acid enzymes; RNA and Structural biology.
Open Book Publishers
Open Book Publishers (OBP), founded in 2008, is a leading independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed monographs, edited collections, textbooks, critical translations and more. We are a non-profit social enterprise based in the UK and run by academics who are committed to making high-quality research available to every reader. All our books are available to read free of charge in open access formats (PDF, HTML and XML), as well as high-quality paperbacks and hardbacks and affordable ebooks. We do not charge our authors to publish with us and they retain full copyright of their work.
Open Library of the Humanities
OLH is an extremely cost-effective solution for open access in the humanities disciplines. For less than a single Article Processing Charge’s (APC) worth of funding at for-profit entities, we publish and support 23 journals, all of which are gold open access with open licenses, and we never charge authors fees.
PsyArXiv
A free preprint service for the psychological sciences. Maintained by The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.
Reveal Digital
Reveal Digital's unique library crowd-funding model uses library acquisition dollars to fund the development of digital collections. Our new approach to funding the digitization of special collections insures that access to important cultural material is free and accessible to all. Projects include "Diversity & Dissent," "Understanding Hate in America," and "Independent Voices."
SCOAP3
Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics is a one-of-its-kind partnership of over three thousand libraries, key funding agencies and research centers in 44 countries and 3 intergovernmental organisations. Working with leading publishers, SCOAP3 has converted key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access at no cost for authors. SCOAP3 centrally pays publishers for costs involved in providing Open Access, publishers in turn reduce subscription fees to all their customers, who can re-direct these funds to contribute to SCOAP3. Each country contributes in a way commensurate to its scientific output in the field. In addition, existing Open Access journals are also centrally supported, removing any existing financial barrier for authors.
SPARC
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.

Publishers and Journals Offering APC Discounts and Waivers

Some publishers that require fees for publishing now offer various waivers and discounts. Some of these are due to agreements they have made with the UO Libraries, and others are stand alone offers for authors. It is important to search for these before submitting your work, as some require that you indicate interest at the time you submit. Others offer the option after your article has been accepted. All of the waivers and discounts that we have encountered so far have kept the financial request separate from the editorial process.

Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Cambridge University offers APC waivers or discounts for any author. After exploring all other sources of funding, authors can apply using the Cambridge Waiver or Discount Request Form.
MDPI
MDPI waives approximately 25% - 27% of APC fees every year with discounts ranging from 15% in the most established journals, up to 100% in newer or humanities journals. In many social sciences and humanities journals they waive between 70% - 100% of APCs. Authors can request a waiver with the editorial office when submitting their article.
PLOS
PLOS offers a Publication Fee Assistance Program to help authors unable to pay all or part of their publication fees and who can demonstrate financial need. Note that interested authors must apply for a waiver when submitting their article, rather than after.
SPIE
SPIE waives the open access fee on specific paper types, such as Reviews and Tutorials, as well as all articles for select titles.
Springer Nature
Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts on a case-by-case basis based on financial need. All applications for discretionary APC waivers and discounts should be made at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance are unable to be considered.