Co-funding by the ETH Board for our Open Access Fund – New APC cap

The Lib4RI Open Access fund supports authors at Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL who wish to publish in fully Open Access (OA) journals and who are required to pay an article processing charge (APC). The OA fund was first introduced in 2009 for researchers at Eawag and Empa and was extended in 2021 to also support researchers at PSI and WSL. So far, more than 300 articles have been funded.

Lib4RI applied for a project within the Open Science program of swissuniversities co-funded by the ETH Board for the Lib4RI OA fund. This is one of several projects in the action line Open Access Fund. Subject to the final approval of swissuniversities, the ETH Board will support the Lib4RI OA fund in the years 2022 to 2024. This is great news because it will allow us to offer funding via the OA Fund for the next years without any limit to the number of articles that can be supported. However, this support by the ETH Board is linked to the requirement that only APCs up to 2500 CHF (excl. VAT) are eligible for funding by the Lib4RI OA fund.

An APC cap of 2500 CHF (excl. VAT) will exclude articles in some journals from funding by the OA Fund. Nevertheless, the shift from the current APC cap of 3000 CHF per article (incl. VAT) is small and more than 90% of full OA journals listed in OpenAPC will still be eligible for funding. In addition, we are currently negotiating agreements with several OA publishers which would allow corresponding authors affiliated with the four research institutes to publish in these journals without paying an individual APC. Therefore, we are confident that – overall – we will be able to offer more options to publish OA for researchers at the four research institutes in 2022 and beyond.

This new APC cap of 2500 CHF (excl. VAT) for the Open Access Fund will be effective as of January 1, 2022 and will be applied to all articles with first submission to a journal after January 1, 2022.