Open Access fund

Lib4RI supports researchers at Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL who are willing to publish articles in pure Open Access journals with a publishing fund to cover reasonable article processing charges (APCs). The fund is intended as a last resort for articles accepted for publication in eligible Open Access, peer-reviewed journals to cover fees when funds from any other source are unavailable.

Funding conditions and application process

  • The complete article processing charges are paid from the Open Access Fund if the following funding conditions are met:

    • The submitting/corresponding author must have a demonstrable relationship with Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL and the (co-)affiliation with at least one of these institutions must be stated in the article.
    • The article must have been accepted for publication in a journal whose entire content is accessible free of charge via the internet immediately after publication (“pure Open Access journal”). The journal applies quality assurance methods (peer review) acknowledged in the specific subject area. Journals should be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
    • The article is published under a Creative Commons licence (preferably CC-BY).
    • Articles will be considered only if there is no other source of funding available. We expect researchers to request funding for Open Access publications from their funding agency if they can do so. For articles resulting from SNSF-funded research, see SNSF: Open access article publications.
    • The article processing charges for publications may not exceed CHF 2,500 per article (excl. VAT). Partial reimbursement is not possible. This includes models where the APC for an article is split into several payments by the publisher (e.g. Guided Open Access).
    • Financing your publication is only possible if the invoice still has to be paid, there will be no retrospective payments or reimbursements.

    The funding conditions have been established in consultation with the research institutions.

    See also the FAQ.

    • Articles made freely accessible for an extra author charge parallel to being published in a subscription-based journal (so called “hybrid journals”). If a journal offers to publish your article Open Access and the journal is not listed in the DOAJ , it is most likely a “hybrid journal”.
    • Additional costs for rapid peer review, illustration and colour fees, editorial assessment charges, overlength or the like will not be accepted.

  • Please follow the process outlined below to keep the administrative effort for you and us as low as possible:

    • Please first refer to the funding conditions to check whether your publication is eligible for funding from the Open Access Fund. Do not hesitate to contact the Lib4RI Publication Services team (@email) should you have any further questions.
    • Ask the publisher to issue the invoice for your article processing charges to the following invoice recipient:

      Eawag
      Zentraler Rechnungseingang
      REF-10003360
      Überlandstrasse 133
      8600 Dübendorf
      Switzerland

      @email

      VAT ID (Eawag): CHE-116.133.529
       
    • Apply for funding by sending us (@email):
      1) the invoice or the e-mail with the link to the invoice
      2) a PDF of the final accepted article (this allows us to collect the bibliographic metadata for our internal documentation)
      3) include the title of the journal, the publisher and the DOI (if available)
    • We will get back to you as soon as possible regarding the formal eligibility of your application. We will settle your invoice with the publishing company. Do not pay the invoice.

Funded articles

Further resources

FAQs

FAQs

  • As the APC-funded model of OA publishing has grown, concerns have been raised over its sustainability. It is especially worrying that APCs are showing annual increases much beyond the rate of inflation. For example, the report Monitoring the Transition to Open Access (chapter 4) indicates a 16% increase in the average APC amount from 2013 to 2016 for the UK, while the Consumer Price Index rose only 5%. Data from 2005 to 2018 on the APCs paid by European institutions shows that from a mean APC of €858 in 2005, APCs have nearly doubled, to over €1600 in 2018 (Aasheim et al., 2019). These increases in APCs impose an unsustainable pressure on the budget of Lib4RI. To counteract escalating APCs, we introduced an APC cap of CHF 2500 (excl. VAT) in our Open Access Publication Fund. This is in line with the regulations of other European research institution (e.g. TU9-Guideline ; max. EUR 2000). It should also be noted that a price cap of CHF 2500 does exclude only very few, very expensive OA-Journals from funding. According to the OpenAPC database collecting data on APCs paid by European institutions, less than 5% of the OA-journals included in the database charge APCs of more than CHF 2500 (data: OpenAPC 2021).

    In addition, an APC cap of 2500 CHF (excl. VAT) is also a requirement of the co-funding by the ETH Board for our Open Access Fund; see Co-funding by the ETH Board for our Open Access Fund – New APC cap.

  • First, an APC cap should both signal to researchers and to the publishing industry that Open Access needs to remain affordable. Partly funding APCs exceeding the APC price cap would not send this signal. Second, in most situations both parts of a “splitted APC” would ultimately be paid by Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL. The splitting of the APC would increase the administrative effort for handling the invoice(s) and, therefore, even increase the actual costs.

  • Hybrid Open Access describes a publishing model where some articles are made Open Access, against the payment of an APC, while other articles remain Closed Access, and the journal as a whole is subscription-based. The problem of Hybrid Open Access is the so called “double dipping”, i.e. paying twice to publish and read the same article. Publishers collect money when subscriptions are paid by the library and once more when authors are charged an APC to make their article Open Access. If the APC for the article is funded by the Open Access Fund, the Lib4RI pays twice for the same article.

    Technically, publishing an article Open Access as part of the Read & Publish agreements with Elsevier and Springer is also a form of Hybrid Open Access. However, double dipping is avoided here because reading access and Open Access publishing fees are covered by a flat fee to the publisher.

    Further reading:
    Mittermaier B. Double Dipping in Hybrid Open Access – Chimera or Reality? 2015.
    Matthias L. The worst of both worlds: Hybrid Open Access. OpenAIRE. 2018.

  • There are three typical reasons why a journal is not indexed in DOAJ:

    • The journal is a Hybrid Open Access journal (see above). Hybrid Open Access journals are not indexed in the DOAJ, only pure Open Access journals. Please also note that Hybrid Open Access Journals are excluded from funding.
    • The journal does not meet the criteria for inclusion in DOAJ and was rejected by DOAJ. Avoid publishing in these journals.
    • The journal is very new (< 6 months) and not yet indexed in the DOAJ. If this is the case, we might still cover the APC. Contact us!