In our efforts to make information open to all, the Amherst College faculty have adopted an open access resolution. The policy requires you to submit an electronic copy of the author's final version of the manuscript along with the bibliographical information for the article. The Open Access Policy automatically gives Amherst an institutional license, with the right to make the article openly accessible, in the Octagon, the College's institutional repository. Please refer to the open access instructions for faculty and the open access FAQ for further details.
The library will make up to $20,000 available each year from its materials budget to support open access publishing. Amherst College faculty publishing in peer-reviewed, open access publications may request up to $2,000 in assistance from the Library to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) or Book Processing Charges (BPCs). Any funds not allocated by April 30th will return to the library’s materials budget. Fees charged by non-open-access journals/books to make individual articles/chapters freely available are not eligible for this grant. Faculty with co-authors at other institutions that offer APC/BPC support should coordinate funding requests across institutions to split costs when possible. Please contact Martin Garnar (mgarnar@amherst.edu) for information about subsidies.
We believe that the Amherst College Library should respond to the effort to make scholarly research as accessible as possible to scholars and students all over the world by actively supporting open access publishing. OA makes digital access free to users. In the “author pays” model, authors, or their sponsors, pay fees upfront to defray production costs; libraries and readers pay nothing; peer-review is unchanged.
This alternative to traditional subscription-based publishing is championed by Nobel laureate, former National Institutes of Health director and Amherst alumnus Harold Varmus ‘61. Varmus was not only instrumental in starting the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, which mirrors open access titles and contains archival content for journals that have decided to make their back issues available for free, but is also co-founder and Chairman of the Board of the Public Library of Science (PLoS).
By covering the full costs of production through author fees, rather than levying page charges on authors and then charging readers to access articles open access publishers such as PLoS and BioMed Central (BMC) have transformed the traditional publishing system.
Open access is having an impact on scholarly publishing. Submission to an open access journal is certain to remove the financial access barriers for potential readers of your work -- and evidence suggests that open access publishing increases the reach and impact of your work.
Funding agencies such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the Rockefeller Foundation have stated policies allowing the use of grants to cover article processing charges. The Library’s institutional memberships and subscriptions provide Amherst authors with discounts or waivers on author charges at PLoS, BMC, and others.
We will continue our support for Amherst College authors from all disciplines who choose open access publishing. Funding from the Library will subsidize or pay in full the author charges for all peer reviewed, open access journals as detailed above. It will not pay author fees demanded by non-open-access journals to make individual articles freely available.