OA and the Academy: Evaluating an OA Fund with Authors’ Input

Gail McMillan; Leslie O’Brien; Edward F. Lener

doi:10.5860/crl.84.3.357

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About The Authors

Gail McMillan is Director of Scholarly Communication at University Libraries, Virginia Tech, email: gailmac@vt.edu. Leslie O’Brien is Director of Collections and Technical Services at University Libraries, Virginia Tech, email: lobrien@vt.edu. Edward F. Lener is Associate Director for Collection Management at University Libraries, Virginia Tech, email: lener@vt.edu.

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OA and the Academy: Evaluating an OA Fund with Authors’ Input

Gail McMillan, Leslie O’Brien, Edward F. Lener

Abstract

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech established an Open Access Subvention Fund (OASF) in August 2012. Although it began as a two-year pilot project, the Fund has continued to the present. Anyone at Virginia Tech is eligible to apply for funding to offset the cost of an article processing charge to publish in an open access journal. To learn more about user perceptions of the OASF and open access in general, we surveyed everyone who had requested support. The survey, conducted during the fall of 2019, provided a means to gauge the needs of our users, seek feedback on the request and award process, and gather input on the fund guidelines. In this article, we review our findings in the hope that the lessons learned will be useful to other libraries in assessing similar open access subvention funds.