This LibGuide aims to describe how AU Libraries invests in various open access opportunities to assist our researchers in the pursuit of their scholarly endeavors.
Throughout this guide, you can discover information on:
Auburn University Libraries contributes to the financial support of open access in multiple ways.
AUrora - Our institutional repository serves as digital storage for the scholarly output of Auburn University faculty, staff, and students, including pre-prints of research article publications.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - An independent global index of open access scholarly research journals in all disciplines. As a member of the ASERL library consortium, Auburn University Libraries helps to support the DOAJ financially through annual contributions. The DOAJ not only makes open access content more visible and accessible but also vets online journals to ensure that minimum academic standards are met.
This support includes the targeted use of fiscal year monies within our collection development budget.
Subscribe to Open (S2O) - Subscription fees for some online journals are applied to converting subscription journals to open access resources over time. Annual Reviews is an example of a publisher committed to using fees currently paid by libraries to make their content freely available. Another example is the journal Demography.
Knowledge Unlatched - Some publishers such as Knowledge Unlatched make content open access after receiving a minimum number of payments from interested libraries or other contributors. This business model is similar to Subscribing to Open but generally applies to eBooks instead of online journals. AU Libraries has invested in a limited number of these collections.
SCOAP3 - Auburn University Libraries has participated in SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, for many years. AU Libraries and other participating institutions pay fees that subsidize the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) on behalf of contributing scientists. The overall cost of fees is based on the share of worldwide scientific output in High-Energy Physics, a system that is managed centrally at CERN with costs for individual institutions administered through library consortia such as Lyrasis.
This informative guide designed by our Research Data Management Librarian provides further insight into open access publishing, including author copyright and Creative Commons licenses, how to submit scholarly articles to our open repository (AUrora), and a thorough explanation of preprint materials.
An open-access repository of research and scholarly works by Auburn University faculty members, AUrora supports the outreach mission of Auburn University by making research by Auburn faculty accessible to citizens of the state of Alabama and to the general public.
Designed and managed by our Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian, this LibGuide provides a brief synopsis of the types of open access publishing and annual news updates about International Open Access Week.
Auburn University Libraries has a limited number of transformative agreements, which are license agreements with publishers that include fees that can be administered to cover the expense of Article Processing Charges (APCs) for contributing authors. This essentially means that instead of paying for the cost of APCs themselves, authors affiliated with Auburn University can publish in online journals covered by the transformative agreements at no additional charge since the Libraries have already paid for this service.
Precise licensing terms can vary since some negotiations provide unlimited coverage while others offer a limited number of APCs, as defined in the legal terms of specific contracts. To learn more about these agreements and their relation to open access, see Transformative Agreements: A Primer from The Scholarly Kitchen.
AU Libraries currently has three transformative agreements that grant unlimited APCs for Auburn University authors who wish to publish in online journals provided by Cambridge University Press, The Company of Biologists, and IOP Publishing. However, since the Libraries do not currently receive any additional financial support for open access publishing, we continue to designate our scarce financial resources only to those transformative agreements that provide unlimited coverage for APCs at little or no additional charge beyond our regular subscription fees.
Since some publishers may only provide transformative agreements with limited coverage of APCs and can charge additional fees that cost 10 percent or more than our standard subscriptions, expanding our transformative agreements is not always feasible. Providing additional open access resources to our patrons could require canceling other subscriptions or reducing our financial support for different information resources requested from Auburn faculty, staff, and students.
