The Open Access Publishing Fund is made available by the Library to UCSF faculty, postdocs, students, and other researchers so that their scholarly articles and books may be openly published for all to access. If you or your research team have grant funding or funds through your department to cover your publication costs, please use those funds to pay your publication charges. This will help ensure that funding goes to authors without these resources.
Eligible Applicants
Current UCSF personnel and students with the following titles who do not have funding to pay for OA publication charges may apply for funds once an article or book has been accepted for publication and before it is published:
Each application must have a sponsor from one of the series listed above. An awarded application will constitute that sponsor's allocation for the calendar year (journal article) or for two years (book). Only one application may be submitted per eligible publication. See amounts covered below.
As of July 1, 2020, the person sponsoring a funding request for a journal article must also be the corresponding author. The corresponding author can be someone who is no longer at UCSF, provided that the work being reported was conducted at UCSF and the author's UCSF affiliation appears in the article.
UCSF researchers are encouraged to include a line item for open access article or book processing charges in future grant proposals. Many funders, including the NIH and the Gates Foundation, cover such costs.
Publishing discounts are available to UCSF and UC authors from several publishers and should be arranged with the publisher. In addition, UC has comprehensive OA publishing deals with several publishers for articles with a UC corresponding author. Payment for covered articles should be handled directly with these publishers and not through this fund.
Publications that otherwise meet the publication criteria below but that charge to download file formats other than HTML will be funded at up to half the amount in the respective category.
Funds are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.
Sales tax does not apply in California to open access publication charges since it is non-tangible property (see Sales and Use Tax). This fund will not cover sales or VAT taxes if the publisher mistakenly charges them. Authors should ask publishers to remove any such taxes.
Journal Article Criteria
Journals covered by a comprehensive UC OA publishing deal, including Elsevier, JMIR, PLOS, and Springer Nature, should be handled through that deal and not through this fund. See UCSF OA Publishing Discounts and UC-Publisher Relationships for details about all publishers with existing agreements.
Book Criteria
For reference: Criteria for evaluating publishers
Names of award recipients and information about publications funded will be included on this web site and in reports and announcements about the fund. Your feedback about this fund is important for our evaluation, so we will send an occasional brief survey to funding recipients.