With the closing of another fiscal year, Scholarly Platforms & Discovery Services is glad to report another year in which the funds set aside to cover Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Open Access articles were used up very quickly. While it is unfortunate to have to begin a waitlist so soon after opening the fund, it means that all of the funding is going towards making Boston College scholarship more openly accessible for scholars and researchers around the world.
This year, authors from fields including Biology, Nursing, Psychology, and Social Work had applications accepted, meaning that the burden of covering the costs to make their work openly accessible was covered by the university. Lowering the burden of cost for readers is an important part of what we can do in libraries to help make scholarly research more equitable – that said, creating a system where authors pay to make their work open could mean that institutions with more funding are more able to make their work openly accessible, increasing its reach more than a less financially well-off university or institution. The Open Access Fund does not fund scholarship submitted to “hybrid” or “transformative” journals, which are journals that provide the option to authors to make their individual articles available for free, but ultimately charge a subscription. As always, it is important to think critically about how our decisions and platforms may lead to certain voices or elements being elevated as a result of the systems we have in place.
To see a list of past winners of the award and data visualizations detailing the breakdown of our funding, check out this LibGuide on the Open Access Publishing Fund. While changes to the funding structures of many institutions are currently in flux based on broader geo-political shifts, we hope to be able to offer a number of Boston College authors open access publishing funds in the coming year – if you are interested in making your upcoming project available open access, please check back at the beginning of June for more information.