There are many ways to make your scholarly work openly accessible. The Libraries supports open access (OA) publishing because it makes research freely available to readers around the world. In addition to the avenues listed below, the Libraries is pleased to announce a new opportunity for UMN scholars. We are piloting a new model of funding open access publishing that eliminates author fees for a significant number of publications from across the university.

Through the BTAA, the University of Minnesota has entered into a one-year agreement with Wiley that provides article processing charge (APC) credits for 288 articles published in Wiley’s hybrid open access journals in 2022. Wiley, like most commercial publishers, typically charges APCs to make articles fully open access for readers. This new agreement covers original research and review articles in Wiley’s hybrid Open Access journals when the corresponding author is from the University of Minnesota Duluth, Morris, Rochester, or Twin Cities campuses. To take advantage of this opportunity, authors must select the OA option during the article acceptance process, before the article is in Early View or In Issue online. For more information, check Wiley’s website.

Although this new agreement will increase the number of OA articles from UMN authors, there are many other routes to OA that scholars can take advantage of without having to pay APCs. We’ve gathered up these options on a new webpage, “So, you want to make your work open access? Here are your options!”  As an author, you can can:

• Publish in an OA journal that has no fees (DOAJ lists thousands of options)
• Share your article as an open preprint (check SHERPA/ROMEO for details on which version can be shared in which venue)
• Share at no cost following publishers’ rules (SHERPA/ROMEO has this information too!)
• Maintain control, then share how you want (you have many rights as an author, read about how you can retain them)
• Use the University of Minnesota’s “Open Access to Scholarly Articles” Policy

For more information about your OA options, contact openaccess@umn.edu.

BTAA negotiated the Wiley agreement as part of the Big Collection, a new initiative through which the BTAA libraries aim to manage their collections in a united, cohesive way.

“We are excited to be working with the BTAA to increase the number of open access articles from our authors,” said Lisa German, Dean of UMN Libraries. “We will continue to pursue our vision for a sustainable open access future to enable authors to make their work OA at no cost.”

Read about our vision here z.umn.edu/TowardsOA. Outside of the BTAA, the Libraries has other agreements that provide free or reduced OA charge with a number of publishers, which you can read about here.

Authors whose work is funded by one of the major U.S. federal government departments or agencies should check their grant award to determine if their publications and data are subject to public access policies. Publishing OA in Wiley hybrid journals or other OA venues will not satisfy US federal funding agencies’ public access requirements.