Open Access

Coastal Carolina University Libraries has allocated funding to promote, and support open access publishing for CCU faculty, students, and staff. This fund will cover the cost, up to $5000, of article processing charges (APCs) for fully open articles. Read the eligibility information below before submitting a Funding Request Form.

Eligible Authors: APC funding is available to any current faculty, staff, or students affiliated with Coastal Carolina University.

Eligible Publication Types: Funds apply to publication and processing fees for scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles.

Eligible Publication Venues: Funds may be used to pay processing fees associated with publishing peer-reviewed scholarship on an open access basis. Eligible open access publishers may operate on a not-for-profit or a commercial basis, but the article must be freely available online, with no charge to readers or readers' institutions for access.

For fully open journals to be eligible, an article must meet at least one of the following criteria:

• The journal in which your article will be published is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA);
• The publisher is conducting business in a manner consistent with the OASPA Code of Conduct;
• The journal provides immediate access to peer-reviewed articles. 

No Alternative Funding Available: These funds are intended to support open access as a funding source of last resort. Articles for which alternate publication funding is available are not eligible. 

Per-Work Reimbursement Cap: The most this fund will reimburse for a single article is $5,000.

Author Affiliation: The library only allocates funding for authors who are affiliated with Coastal Carolina University.  

Reimbursement Mechanism: The author should forward a copy of the publisher’s invoice or any payment information to the library. The library will pay the publisher directly for the amount of the award.

Fund Cap: Funding is allocated year-by-year and is strictly limited each academic year. Awards for works that meet the eligibility criteria will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis; if funds are depleted before end of the fiscal year (June 30), the program will be closed to new submissions for the rest of the funding period.

Application Process: Articles accepted for publication up to a year prior to the funding request are eligible for this program. The request deadline for each fiscal year is April 30th. Submit the Funding Request Form to apply.

Regular Review: All aspects of this program, including the amount of funding committed to it, will be analyzed and reviewed on a regular basis. The program is an experiment and continued funding is decided year to year.

Authors agree to deposit a copy of the funded article in CCU's Digital Commons.

Authors agree to attend a consultation that outlines the program and considerations of Open Access and the scholarly publishing landscape.