Cambridge University Library has established a new institutional open access fund to provide financial support for unfunded researchers across the collegiate University.
The purpose of the institutional fund is to provide a route to gold open access for those who do not have access to grant funds with which to pay the open access fees in fully open access journals. Staff and students of the University of Cambridge (including the Colleges) who wish to publish a research article (i.e., papers that report the results of a research project) or non-narrative review paper can use the fund to pay for open access fees in fully gold open access journals.
Examples of non-narrative review papers include evidence syntheses, systematic reviews, systematic-literature reviews, analyses, meta-analyses and metasyntheses.
The fund is available for papers that:
- Have a University of Cambridge researcher on the author team (ideally, a corresponding author),
- The paper is research article, being published in a fully open access journal, and where
- The open access fee cannot be covered by any other means (for example, through a transitional deal, alternative grants etc.)
The fund does not cover other publication costs such as page charges, colour charges or administrative fees or open access fees in hybrid journals. It also does not cover instances where the article type in question is always published open access, despite being in a hybrid journal.
Please note that the fund does not cover alumni, visiting or honorary staff or students, although exceptions may be made where there is a strong connection to the University of Cambridge.
Although funding cannot be reserved at submission, researchers can ask the Open Access Team to provide in principle advice. We will carefully monitor the fund to ensure that the fund can cover fees once they become due.
If you have any questions about access to the fund, please contact the Open Access Team.