The publication fund at the University of Tromsø

As part of the work to make the research from the university as accessible and reused as possible, UiT The Arctic University of Norway is making allocations in the budget to cover author-side payments in Open Access journals. Open Access journals have no constraints to reader access, and thus cannot demand payment from readers. They have to finance their activities in other ways. An important and widespread model is that authors have to pay an amount to cover the publishers' costs, in order to have their articles published.

Through the fund, the university seeks to cover such expenses, to ensure the costs do no hinder authors from publishing Open Access. The fund has as a general rule, that articles built on externally funded research also should be covered by the same funders that funded the research itself. It is extremely important that researchers include such costs in their funding applications. Research funded by the Norwegian Research Council is eligible for support from the fund, as the NRC are funding part of the fund.

Funding of author-side payments 

The fund can cover author-side costs as Article Processing Charges (APCs), Article Submisson Charges and similar charges in Open Access journals. The fund will at the outset cover the whole cost, but if the number of articles are greater than the fund can finance, the fund can cover a percentage of costs or put a cap on how much it can cover per article.

These expenses are not covered by the fund

• Colour, illustration or page charges etc, that are common and will have to be paid also in traditional journals.
• Partial costs covering the UiT "share" of a co-authored article, where only some authors belong to UiT. The fund will cover the whole cost if the corresponding author is a UiT affiliate, else it will cover nothing. Dividing up invoices incur high costs, and we do not want the fund to create added administrative costs.
• Cost for making an individual article Open Access in a subscription journal (aka hybrid publishing). This is increasingly an option for authors, but incurs large expences, and, we suspect, actually entails us paying twice for the same service.

We refer you to the complete rules (currently only available in Norwegian) and to the application form (Norwegian version) for furher information.

For further information, please contact:

• Jan Erik Frantsvåg jan.e.frantsvag@uit.no phone 77 64 49 50
• Leif Longva leif.longva@uit.no phone 77 64 62 55
• Stein Høydalsvik stein.hoydalsvik@uit.no phone 77 64 63 46