Open Access Authors Fund

Author Eligibility

All faculty, graduate students, post-docs, and staff on the KU main campus in Lawrence, the Edwards campus, and Leavenworth campus are eligible to apply. Priority will be given to first time OA Author Fund applicants, graduate students, early career research staff, pre-tenure faculty, and those with little or no research funding to support their open access publishing. Authors applying for funds and the primary authors of the publications must be KU employees or students. Preference is given to research or scholarship primarily conducted by KU employees or students. At the time of award, the applicant or primary author must still be KU employees or students. An author can only receive one award in a fiscal year.

We expect researchers to use appropriate research grant funds to pay such publication charges where applicable. For example, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation will fund open access publications as part of their research grants. For questions related to research funds and your application please email us authorsfund@ku.edu.

Journal Eligibility

Authors are encouraged to consult the OA Author Fund reviewers about the eligibility and quality of open access journals before submitting manuscripts. Email your questions to authorsfund@ku.edu.

Authors applying for open access author funds must be publishing in journals that meet the below criteria:

• Provide unfettered access to all peer-reviewed articles -- be an entirely open access journal. Journals with a hybrid open-access model or delayed open-access model are not eligible.
• Be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• Be published by a member organization of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
• Have a standard article fee schedule publicly posted.

Authors are encouraged to review the journal for quality indicators such as those listed in the Evaluating OA Journals & Publishers research guide especially for those journals and publishers for which they are unfamiliar. Think.Check.Submit may also help identify trusted journals for your research. They provide a simple checklist that researchers can use to evaluate journal or publisher credibility. Reviewers of the application may also use those indicators when deciding whether a journal meets the quality criteria for funding.

Article eligibility

Articles must:

• Be a peer-reviewed article submitted to an open access journal.
• Not have been published prior to the review of applications. The review of applications received during the previous month will be reviewed during the first 5 business days of the next month. For example, an application submitted in June will be reviewed during the first 5 business days of July.
• Already-published articles are ineligible.
• Have publication status of, "submitted-for-publication" or "accepted-for-publication." Funds will not be encumbered for manuscripts that are still being written.

Award limit, Disbursement and Administration

Award Limit

Awards may be used to pay article processing charges up to $2,000 per article, but not color, page, or image charges.

Fund Disbursement

• Funds will be divided into one-month portions. Applications received during the previous month will be reviewed within the first 5 business days of the next month, prioritized, and weighted for need.
• Applicants will be notified by email.
• Funds are incumbered for an awardee for four months. If an author’s paper is not accepted or an invoice is not received the award expires. The author will be contacted and may later reapply for funds.
• Once a request has been approved, send the invoice to authorsfund@ku.edu.
• Funds may only be paid to publishers' invoices or to KU department invoices for the amount of the award. Individual authors will not be reimbursed or paid for retroactive publications.
  • For clarity, this requires awardees to request a split invoice from the publisher or to have their department pay the full invoice and seek reimbursement from the Libraries for the amount awarded. This process cannot be used for an article that is already published at the time of the review.

Competitive Review

Funding will be distributed through a monthly, competitive review process. Weighted priority will be based on: 1) author status (graduate student, pre-tenure faculty, early career research staff); 2) those who lack funding for open access publication charges; 3) those who have not previously applied for open access author funds.

Additional Criteria

The fund is a limited resource intended to support open access publishing across the university. We expect researchers to request funding for open access publication from their funding agency if they can do so. If such funds are not available, we welcome your application.

KU Libraries will upload the published version of each funded article to KU ScholarWorks, KU's open access digital archive of the scholarly work of KU.

Fund Administration

KU Libraries administer and assess the program on an annual basis. From FY13 through FY24 the program was jointly administered by KU and KUMC Libraries with oversight and funds provided by KU Provost, KU Vice Chancellor for Research, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Research.

Citing the Fund

Please include the following statement in your final manuscript: “The article processing charges related to the publication of this article were supported by The University of Kansas (KU) Open Access Author Fund sponsored and managed by the University of Kansas Libraries.”