Open Access Publishing Fund
By Karen Burton, Science Librarian, Clemson Libraries
Open Access Publishing was thrown into the spotlight in 2022 upon the release of the Office of Science and Technology Policy memo that recommends federal agencies “make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo.” With article processing charges ranging from $500 to $5,000 and up, publishing in Open Access journals can be expensive, especially for graduate students and early career faculty. The Clemson Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund (OAPF) was created in 2016 and has awarded over $200,000 in funds to Clemson authors who publish Open Access. Anyone currently affiliated with Clemson is eligible to apply to the OAPF, and we have awarded funds to everyone from new graduate students to postdocs to tenured faculty who have been part of Clemson for decades. You can read more about the fund and learn how to apply on our webpage.
One of our recent recipients was Virginia Abernathy, a Lecturer from Biological Sciences, who said that “the OA fund through the CU Libraries provided me with funds necessary to publish a paper written by myself and several of my Creative Inquiry students that had been accepted to an OA journal. As my department has no specific funds for publishing papers, this grant from the library was incredibly beneficial for my students, allowing them to become co-authors on a peer-reviewed article!”
Transformative Agreements
By Christopher Vidas, Head of Collections and Acquisitions, Clemson Libraries
Publishing open access (OA) content has many advantages, such as increasing readership and generating greater impact for valuable research. Clemson Libraries has been steadily expanding our participation in “read and publish,” or transformative agreements (TAs). These agreements provide the traditional ability to access and read research content while at the same time allowing authors to receive vouchers to publish articles as open access without needing to pay the costly article processing charge (APC) that tends to be associated with OA publishing.
Clemson Libraries now participates in numerous TAs that have been deemed fiscally and administratively feasible to manage. Examples of current licenses include Wiley, Cambridge University Press, ACM, the Institute of Physics, and others which can be found at the following site, along with details surrounding how to participate: https://clemson.libguides.com/transformative/at-clemson.
In reference to the Wiley agreement, one faculty author exclaimed, “Thank you, Clemson Libraries, for this amazing resource! The biggest constraint for my lab is publication costs.”