Contact
Use our form to send us comments (NetID required). Or contact the program director:
Kizer Walker
Uris Library, Room 309
Cornell University Library
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607 254-1375)
Open access scholarly publishing
Open access scholarly publishing is gaining ground as an alternative to conventional means of disseminating the results of academic research, dispensing with cost barriers and use restrictions for readers. Open access publishing makes peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly work freely available online to a worldwide readership. Open access journals are now firmly established in many fields of research and robust open access publishing programs for scholarly books have begun to take hold.
While open access publications are free to read, it costs money to manage the peer-review process and produce and distribute electronic journals and books. Since open access publishers do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources. This may include foundation support, subventions, and in-kind support, as well as processing fees paid by authors – or on behalf of authors by their institutions.
The Cornell Open Access Publishing fund
The Cornell Open Access Publishing (COAP) fund underwrites reasonable publication charges for articles and books by Cornell authors who are non-tenured faculty members, academic staff members, or students, published in fee-based open access journals when other funding sources are not available.
From its inception in 2010, the COAP program has contributed to publication and processing charges for more than 150 open access publications by more than 100 Cornell authors from more than 50 academic departments and programs on Cornell’s Ithaca campus.
The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity
The COAP fund was established in the context of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity, a multi-institutional initiative in support of a sustainable transition to open access, to which Cornell is a signatory. The universities participating in the Compact “recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents.”