Tufts provides funding for article processing charges (APCs) for its authors who are publishing open access and also provides financial support for open content, infrastructure, and advocacy organizations. Find out more about:
- Open access publishing funding for Tufts authors
- Free or discounted APCs for Tufts authors
- Additional Tufts Libraries open access support
- Criteria for Tufts Libraries Open Access Investments
- Creating open access to published scholarship without fees
- Completed OA initiatives
Open access publishing funding for Tufts authors
School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering
For tenure-stream A&S faculty members: The Committee on Faculty Research Awards provides funding for open access publishing charges in journals that are 100% open access. To apply for funding, complete the FRAC Open Access Publishing Application.
For all other AS&E authors: The Tisch Library Open Access Publishing Fund provides awards of up to $3,000 to support authors in Arts, Science, and Engineering who want to publish in OA journals or books but do not have other sources of funding to cover open access fees. Articles with A&S faculty co-authors should look to the Faculty Research Award Committee (FRAC) for funding opportunities first. Find out more information on how to apply for the Tisch Library Open Access Publishing Fund.
Boston Health Sciences Campus
The Hirsh Health Sciences Library’s (HHSL) Open Access Publishing Fund aims to improve access to research produced at Tufts University by covering some open access (OA) article processing charges (APC) for students, staff, and faculty with primary Tufts affiliation on the Boston Health Sciences campus who do not have other funding sources.
Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
For authors without other funding sources, the Office of Faculty Affairs Page Charge Policy covers article processing charges in order to make publications open access. In entertaining requests, consideration will be given to ensure funds are fairly distributed.
Other Tufts schools
We encourage authors in other Tufts schools to talk to their deans about funding support possibilities, or to get in touch with their library to talk about ways to make their research open.
Free or discounted APCs for Tufts authors
The Tufts Libraries pay membership fees for the following journals & publishers in order to provide free or discounted article processing charges (APC) to Tufts authors for open access publishing:
| Journal or publisher | Benefit to Tufts authors |
| ACM Open | Tufts has signed a transformative agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Under this new agreement, Tufts corresponding authors publishing in ACM journals, proceedings, and magazines can make their articles freely available to anyone (open access) at no cost to the author. Read more about the ACM Open program. |
| BioMed Central, BMC Chemistry, and SpringerOpen journals | Receive a 15% discount on APCs that range between $1,710 – $3,000 for BioMed Central, BMC Chemistry, and SpringerOpen journals. See the Submission guidelines for authors requesting a membership discount with BMC & SpringerOpen Not applicable to Tufts Medical Center staff without faculty appointments or other affiliations at Tufts University. |
| Royal Society journals | Tufts authors receive a 25% discount on article processing charges through our Royal Society open access membership. |
Additional open access support
The Libraries provide support for several additional open access projects:
| Publisher/provider | Type of OA provider | Description |
| arXiv.org | content | Open access pre-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics |
| DataCite | infrastructure | Supports the creation and management of DOIs and metadata records, and enables the discovery and reuse of research outputs and resources. |
| DOAJ.org | infrastructure | The Directory of Open Access Journals, an index of open access journals |
| Independent Voices | content | A crowd-funded project to digitize and make openly available to the world (after an embargo) magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers of alternative presses from the 1960’s to the 1980’s |
| Hathi Trust | content | A collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world |
| JSTOR Path to Open | content | A multi-year pilot program for library funding to support open access for peer-reviewed monographs in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, available on the JSTOR platform. |
| Library Publishing Coalition | advocacy | The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) extends the impact and sustainability of library publishing and open scholarship by providing a professional forum for developing best practices and shared expertise. |
| Open Library of Humanities | content | A publishing platform that supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines. OLH journals do not have article processing charges |
| Open Science Framework (OSF) | content | An online research platform that enables sharing, collaboration, and discovery of research. |
| ORCID | infrastructure | Open source, community-governed platform that assigns unique researcher/contributor identifiers which may be populated with profile data and exchanged with other publisher, funder and institution systems at the researcher’s discretion |
| PsyArXiv | content | A free preprint service for the psychological sciences |
| SPARC | advocacy | The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design |
| SCOAP3 | content | A collaboration between libraries, publishers, and funding bodies to convert several of the most prestigious journals in high energy physics from subscription to open access, with no article processing charges |
| Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | content | An open access online encyclopedia |
Criteria for Tufts Libraries Open Access Investments
As of Spring 2023, Tufts Libraries’ investments in open access content, infrastructure, and advocacy organizations are guided by the Criteria for Tufts Libraries Open Access Investments.
Create open access to published scholarship without fees
Many publishers now allow authors to deposit a version of their non-open access article into institutional repositories like the Tufts Digital Library so that it is openly available. Find out more about making your work open access in the digital library.
Completed initiatives
A pilot program supported by the Office of the Provost, the Provost’s Open Access Fund (POAF) (2011-2013) successfully educated Tufts faculty across the university about open access and supported open access publication and digitization of their scholarship.
The pilot is complete. During its two plus active years the fund supported nearly 100 Tufts authors and provided over $50,000 in funding. Find out more about Fund recipients.