In January 2007, the University of Amsterdam launched an Open Access fund to help its faculty pay the publication fees at fee-based OA journals. From the fund page:
Since January 2007, the UvA has a dedicated fund of 150.000 EUR per year for the full financing of open access publishing. Researchers can utilise the OA fund in order to finance OA publication costs until the end of 2009. All applications will be honoured as long as the funds last. NB: these funds are solely earmarked for financing the costs of ‘open access’ publication and not for ‘ordinary’ publication costs.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a complete overview of all ‘open access’ journals, incl. the so-called ‘hybrid’ journals by Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell, etcetera. for which the funds may also be used.
The UvA is a member of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed Central, entitling us to a discount when publishing in these publisher’s journals....
Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer in the U of Amsterdam library tells me that the fund will be evaluated after three years and has received an average of two applications per week.
Comment. Kudos to Amsterdam. When the U of Nottingham announced its OA fund earlier this month, I wondered whether there were others. I thank Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer for letting me know about the Amsterdam fund and I repeat my call for others. We'll see many more of these as time goes on, but I want to identify the early leaders.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/26/2007 11:44:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
