BMS Open Access Fund 2023

Before applying for funding check the following steps:

• Always check the open access publishing requirements of the Funding body of your research if OA-publication reimbursement is already in your budget. 
• publish OA free (for NWO/ZonMw funded research) on new platforms for Open-Access: Europe PMC for researchers and openjournals.nl for academic journals.
• As a UT author, you can publish open access at a 100% discount in more than 10.000 high-quality journals, and easily open up your closed publications. Check the UT Journal Browser. In any case, use your utwente email address when you submit your article, make sure that your affiliation on the article contains ‘University of Twente’, and when asked, indicate that you do want to publish open access.
• BMS/ITC has an agreement with Cogitatio Press (e.g. Media and Communication, & Politics and Governance journal), providing a 100% discount.
• Thanks to Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, the final published pdf of UT-affiliated articles, conference papers, and chapters in edited collections become openly available in UT Research Information six months after the first publication date, unless you opt out. Of course, as a UT author, it is your responsibility to make sure your publications are uploaded to Pure. The University Library does the rest.

More info on UT Open Access infopage.

You are eligible for a reimbursement of your JOURNAL PUBLICATION if you meet each of the following conditions:

1.      You are the corresponding author* of the article.
2.      Your employment as the author of the article is at the BMS faculty.
3.      The article states the University of Twente as your affiliation.
4.      The article is published in a (high-quality) open-access journal that is registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
5.      You can only apply for reimbursement if your article is accepted in the period Jan-Dec 2023. The publisher’s invoice has been paid by the section within 2023. BMS will reimburse the section. Article publications will be funded to a maximum of 2000€.
6.      You have not received another grant for covering the cost of publishing this article open access. Reimbursements are only given for costs made by the University of Twente. It is allowed to opt for reimbursement if the journal only gives an APC discount such as BMC and MDPI, or if the yearly limit or available vouchers have been depleted for a journal/publisher (this may happen near the end of the year, e.g. for Emerald and Springer). 

* For the publisher, this is the author who submits the publication and corresponds with the publisher during the publication process. In any case, use your utwente email address when you submit your article and make sure that your affiliation on the article contains ‘University of Twente’.

If you consider publishing your book OA, please first check the following info:

• Evaluate the book publisher. You can e.g. use ‘Think. Check. Submit.’ that offers a checklist for identifying trustworthy publishers for your research.
• The OAPEN OA books toolkit is a free toolkit for authors of academic books. It offers trustworthy and easily findable answers, and guides authors in the process of publishing a book open access.
• The international, informal OA BooksNetwork is a community for authors, publishers, University Libraries, and everyone else who is interested in publishing books open access. The network uses Humanities Commons, a non-profit Academic Social Network.

For support, get in contact with the BMS information specialist.

Making a book Open Access is still at very high costs. The BMS OA fund is limited, see funding for OA books is not always guaranteed. Therefore, we consider several conditions to enable a customized decision to fund (either: no, yes, or partial) and up to what amount. Excluded from reimbursement are purely educational books (textbooks), conference proceedings, dissertations, and translations. Book chapters are also eligible for reimbursement.

Main conditions

1. The book/chapter publication does not result from NWO, Erasmus/EUR, UU or Delft [will be updated if needed]. These organizations have their own fund.
2. The book/chapter states the University of Twente as your affiliation.
3. Open access books must meet the demands as made in the Directory of Open access Books (DOAB). This means that the book is published under an open access license (such as a Creative Commons license) and that peer review has taken place before publication.
4. Your publication concerns a scientific book (or a chapter thereof); a long-form academic work or book on a single or multidisciplinary research topic. This includes (peer-reviewed) edited collections as well as critical editions.
5. The topic has a clear BMS signature, preferably with multiple BMS authors involved or to strengthen collaboration with others within/outside UT.
6. For book chapters: Criteria are similar to an article in a journal. That is, the BMS employee needs to be 1^st author/corresponding author.

Additional conditions

• The book will be published in 2023 or 2024; payment needs to be in 2023.
• When applying for a contribution for an open access book, always enclose the (provisional) contract with a publisher.
• The book publication is organized, by preference, under the Creative Commons license ‘CC-BY’.
• The book publication will have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
• Books/chapters must be placed in UT RIS-PURE within one month after its publication.

Amount of reimbursement 

The contribution for a book is a maximum of 6000€, and max half of the budget for the BMS OA funds can be dedicated to book publications. The contribution for book chapters is a maximum of €1500 per chapter with a maximum of two chapters per book. In the decision on the contributions, we will take into account: 1) the number of BMS authors/editors compared to non-BMS authors/editors, as well as 2) the OA costs for the entire book and 3) the co-funding of other co-authors that contribute to either the chapter or of other non-BMS chapters in the book.