From today (October 1 2014), the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) provides the School with money to cover the cost of article processing charges (APCs) for peer reviewed research, funded wholly or partly by one or more of these UK medical research charities:
- Arthritis Research UK
- Breast Cancer Campaign
- British Heart Foundation
- Cancer Research UK
- Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research
- Wellcome Trust (including WELMEC)
COAF has been established for an initial two-year pilot period, beginning today (1 October 2014). The Wellcome Trust will administer COAF on behalf of the partners for the pilot phase. The partners hope that other Association of Medical Research Charities members will join the Fund over time.
COAF funds may only be used to pay open access article processing charges, not to cover other charges that some journals may levy, such as page and colour charges. Where these apply, researchers must use other funds to meet these costs.
What types of research papers are eligible?
COAF funds may be used to meet open access costs associated with original peer-reviewed research articles and non-commissioned review articles, subject to the requirements outlined below.
Funds may not be used for any open access costs associated with commissioned reviews or conference proceedings.
You may access COAF funds to meet open access costs for any paper resulting from research supported in whole or in part by one or more of the partner funders. However, if other research funders have supported the work reported in the paper, and these funders mandate open access, we expect the open access costs to be split between the contributing funders.
What services must the journal provide to be eligible to receive COAF funds?
Where an APC is paid from COAF, the journal must:
(a) deposit, on behalf of the author, the final version of the article – which includes all the changes that arise from the peer-review, copy-editing and proofing processes – in PubMed Central (PMC), where it must be made freely available at the time of publication (a link to the article on the publisher site is not sufficient); and
(b) license the content under a Creative Commons Attribution-only ( CC-BY) licence.
Content deposited in PMC is automatically mirrored to the Europe PMC repository.
What happens next?
If you are funded by one of the charities that form part of COAF and you wish to pay for your research to be made open access using the fund please see the COAF guidance on the Open Access pages of the School.