Since July 2018, the UNLV Open Article Fund has successfully supported the publication of 78 open access articles by UNLV researchers. The fund, sponsored by the UNLV University Libraries, provides support for the article processing charges used by many open access journals.
Open access to research can be accomplished under different models, and article processing charges are just one example. Other methods include posting a final peer-reviewed manuscript in a repository, such as Digital Scholarship@UNLV, or by sharing works ahead of peer review, such as in arXiv, the preprint server for physics, mathematics, computer science, and other disciplines.
The Libraries' goal is to support authors across many disciplines in their efforts to share their work and extend the ability to pay for APCs to researchers without grant funds to support open publishing. In addition, open access supports the university's status as an R1 institution and UNLV's Top Tier goals by promoting and increasing access to UNLV research across the globe.
The Open Article Fund requirements have evolved over the years. Each year, the Libraries have provided a small budget, ranging from $20,000 to $35,000 per year. For the first year, the fund was supplemented with donor funding provided by the Libraries Advisory Board.
While several requirements for the fund have evolved, the Libraries currently accepts requests from tenure-track or tenured faculty who have not received an award in the last 12 months. Additional requirements include that the article must not be already published, and the journal must be fully open access.
In addition to the fund for tenure-track and tenured faculty, the Minority Serving Institution Student Council (MSISC) has previously sponsored a fund for graduate students, and a new fund supporting the School of Medicine was launched in July.
All the articles supported and subsequently published are not only available as open access in the original journal publication, but have been aggregated into a collection in Digital Scholarship@UNLV.
