Open Access & Amherst College

To help meet the open-access mandate, Frost Library will cover the article processing charge (APC) for articles being published in fully open-access (Gold OA) journals. The Types of Open Access tab can help you understand the different types of open access. 

If your article meets the Gold Open Access requirements and you would like your APC covered by the library, please email Stephanie Capsuto (Science Librarian) and Martin Garnar (Library Director).

• The library will make up to $20,000 available each year from its materials budget to support open access publishing.
• Amherst College faculty publishing in peer-reviewed, open access publications may request up to $2,000 in assistance from the Library to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) or Book Processing Charges (BPCs).
• Any funds not allocated by April 30th will return to the library’s materials budget. Fees charged by non-open-access journals/books to make individual articles/chapters freely available are not eligible for this grant.
• Faculty with co-authors at other institutions that offer APC/BPC support should coordinate funding requests across institutions to split costs when possible.
• Please contact Martin Garnar (mgarnar@amherst.edu) for information about subsidies.

• Read and Publish Agreements combine OA publishing costs with our traditional reading-access journal subscription costs.
• The Amherst College Library now has Read and Publish Agreements with Cambridge University Press and IOP Publishing, allowing Amherst College-affiliated authors to publish articles OA at no cost to you in over 500 OA or Hybrid journals.
• Check out a list of those journals here! 
• To utilize the Read and Publish Agreement, follow the instructions at the publisher's site (linked above) and use your Amherst College email when submitting your article.
• If you have questions about publishing under these agreements, please reach out to Johanna Radding, our Electronic Resources & Discovery Librarian.

Open-access publications are funded in various ways. Although OA takes advantage of digital technology for free dissemination, publication still carries many costs. Sometimes, publishers charge a fee to authors or their institutions to offset these costs (in addition to typesetting and production, salaries for editors and other staff form the bulk of costs associated with publishing). These are known as “article (or book) processing charges” (APCs or BPCs). These can be quite high in some cases. Not all OA publishers charge such fees. 

Similarly, not all open-access publications are run the same way. Many for-profit publishers have developed OA content, recouping costs through APC or BPCs and collecting data from readers and users which they may monetize. Increasingly, advocates of OA are emphasizing governance—who is in charge of open-access publications, and to whose benefit—to encourage more nuanced conversations about openness. Scholar-led OA publications and organizations have been at the forefront of these conversations. 

Here are some resources that explore the politics and practices of open-access publishing in greater depth:

OAPEN OA Toolkit

Jisc Intro to OA

Martin Paul Eve & Jonathan Gray, Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

On Commoning