Opening the Eurac Research Open Access Fund

In 2020 Eurac Research decided to set up an Open Access fund with the aim to grow the number and types of publication in Open Access, with terms of eligibility designed specifically to achieve such growth. This decision was taken in a context where an Open Access policy had been in place since two years.
The Eurac fund supports APCs for both full open access and hybrid journals. In doing so Eurac Research took a different stance to PlanS.
Crucially we included books and book chapters in the range of outputs that the fund does support. The latter was motivated by the wish to increase the openness and accessibility of research published by the humanists and social scientists at our institution. We expect that the book component will afford the largest increment in OA publications in 2021.
This poster presentation offers, as a case study, the approach taken by a medium-sized independent research centre performing applied research in HSS, natural sciences and engineering, to introduce a new institutional funding stream to its researchers to stress the importance of the OA policy and boost the institution’s open access output. We will outline the publishing practices and the funding context of our researchers that led us to decide for broad, inclusive criteria for the OA Fund.
Although the OA fund became operational in January 2021, we expect that by the time of the conference we will have acquired an initial evaluation based on the experience and the data gathered. We will evaluate the stimulus it has provided across the different research groups active in various disciplines at Eurac Research, with a perspective to provide also a more qualitative assessment the researchers´ level of awareness and engagement with open access.