Open Access Initiatives at UF

Published: September 8th, 2010

Category: Memos

Judith Russell, Dean of University Libraries

The University of Florida supports open access (OA) to scholarly literature.  Open access publications are free-of-charge to readers, digital, web-based, and permanently available. Recent studies show that OA benefits the author because articles are published online and made available much faster than those in traditional proprietary journals, thereby giving their research timely visibility, higher citation rates, and greater overall impact.

There are two ways to participate in open access at UF:

  • publishing in an open access journal, and
  • self-archiving in the UF institutional repository—the IR@UF, the portal to UF research.

With support from the Provost, the University of Florida has established an Open Access Publishing Fund Pilot Project (UFOAP) to help UF researchers pay reasonable article-processing fees to cover OA publishing services when funds are not available from other sources. Any UF faculty, post-doctoral researcher, staff, or student author may request up to $3,000 per year. For publishing fund policies, procedures and application, please visit the Smathers Libraries Open Access webpage located, along with additional OA information, on the Libraries homepage.

The Institutional Repository at the University of Florida, the IR@UF is the digital archive for the intellectual output of the UF community, and includes research, news, working papers, data sets, educational and historical materials. The repository is a service to promote UF research, while also providing information to our broader community. We encourage university personnel to contribute their open access research, reports, and other materials to the IR@UF to share research with scholars around the world, to provide a permanent archive for preservation, and to showcase research at UF.

The Smathers Libraries has also become a supporter member of BioMed Central, which provides an automatic 15% discount on article processing charges for any University of Florida researchers publishing in any of its 100+ online journals in BioMed Central, Chemistry Central, or PhyMath Central. In addition, SpringerOpen, a forthcoming series of open access journals, will also honor the same 15% discount on their publications; the first titles will receive submissions soon and will start publishing in early 2011.

For more information on Open Access, visit the Open Access LibGuide or contact Isabel Silver at isilver@ufl.edu or (352) 273-2524.

Comments are currently closed.