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 Faculty Research Awards Committee 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 AS&E students and post-docs: The Tisch Library Open Access Publishing Fund provides awards of up to $3,000.
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 your deans about funding support possibilities, or to get in touch with your 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 | Benefits to Tufts authors |
|---|---|
| ACM Open | Under this agreement with Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 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. Authors should select the “Institutionally paid Open Access” option on acceptance. Contact David Fristrom, Research Librarian for Engineering, with any questions. |
| ACS Read and Green | The American Chemical Society has a new program effective July 1, 2025 through the end of 2027 that allows Tufts corresponding authors to publish their research in any ACS hybrid journal and immediately self-archive their manuscript in their funder or institution’s repository. Note that this does not cover fees to publish in an ACS open access journal, but allows you to deposit a manuscript version of your article in a repository like PubMed or Tufts Digital Library immediately on publication, at no cost. This allows you to comply with federal public access mandates without paying the publisher for open access. |
| BMC, Discover, and Springer Open Access journals | Receive a 15% discount on APCs for BMC, Discover, and Springer Nature open access journals. 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 | 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. |
| Direct to Open | content | Supports publication of new open access monographs from MIT Press, Duke University Press, and Goldsmiths Press and provides access to a backlist of titles for the Tufts community. |
| 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, including Tufts |
| 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 | Extends the impact and sustainability of library publishing and open scholarship by providing a professional forum for developing best practices and shared expertise |
| Limn | content | A diamond open access journal supported through the Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment Program |
| 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 (pdf).
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 Tufts Digital Library so that it is openly available. Find out more about making your work open access in the digital library.