The University has a limited Article Processing Charges (APC) Application Fund to pay open access charges that all academic staff may apply to, subject to eligibility criteria of the article itself. All applications with an APC over £2,500 are subject to the approval of the College Research and KE Director and budget constraints, as the fund is very limited.
The Institutional APC Fund’s primary aim is to enable academic freedom to publish in the context of ensuring wide readership and impact for research. If the most appropriate place to publish is a gold, fully open access journal, then the fund will enable this. Applications from Early Careers Researchers are welcome.
Articles under £2,500 meeting the criteria below will be paid if applications are received prior to publication and funds have not run out for the current academic year. To check remaining funds are available, you can email [email protected].
If you receive grant funding from the UKRI or any of its funding councils, Research England or Innovate UK we have additional funds supplied by UKRI to pay for APCs. Please complete the same form specifying that you receive such funding.
The fund may additionally support the move to a fully open access journal model by supporting publishers who offer substantial discounts (known as an offset) to the cost of an APC in a hybrid journal for which the University has paid for a subscription.
A hybrid journal is one that offers the option of paying to make open access on publication (via an APC), whilst still charging subscription costs to view other articles. We will no longer pay for gold open access charges in hybrid journals where no such deal exists. This is in line with Plan S recommendations, whereby hybrid journals with transformative agreements will be compliant during a transition period.
How to apply
Authors wishing to apply to this fund must check eligibility, complete the online form and wait for approval of their application, before committing the University to payment. If an application meets the criteria and is supported by the College Research and KE Director (if over £2500), then the repository team will confirm whether funds remain available, and liaise with the author to arrange payment.
Eligible Submissions
- Any application needs to be approved by the repository team (who will liaise with the College Research Director if over £2,500) before an author commits the University to payment.
- The fund covers APCs for articles published in pure gold journals, eg those that are entirely free to read. They should be included in DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals) listing.
- It does not cover gold access to individual papers in hybrid journals (those that charge a subscription for the journal, and APCs for individual articles) unless they offer us a substantial discount on the APC charge due to us paying a subscription
- The lead, or corresponding, author must be a member of university staff. The fund is not open to doctoral researchers (other than when they appear as a co-author of a paper submitted by a qualifying staff member)
- Where the research is funded under a grant, then funding for open access charges should be sought from the funder in the first instance. Please see Open Access Funding for more detail. With the exception for researchers in receipt of a research grant from UKRI or any of its funding councils, Research England or Innovate UK - In this instance researchers should complete the APC application form, stating they are in receipt of such funding to access the UKRI OA block grant we have received
Open access without additional payment upon submission
We have agreements in place so that some articles published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Chemical Society (ACS), American Psychological Association (APA), Cambridge University Press (CUP), Elsevier, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis or Wiley can be published with no direct APC to pay. You do not need to apply to the APC fund to benefit from gold open access in these journals. See this blog post for details of each publisher’s journal lists, criteria and updates on any new publishers added.
Contact
Please contact [email protected] for more information or any queries about applying for APC funding.