VT Open Access Subvention Fund: Guidelines

The Subvention Fund has been expended for fiscal year 2024-2025.  Information will be coming soon about plans for the fund in 2025-2026.  We recommend checking the Discounts tab on this guide, using grant funding, inquiring with your department/college/institute, or taking advantage of Virginia Tech's open access policy.

• General
  • Funds are available to underwrite article processing charges (APCs) for scholarly peer-reviewed articles accepted for publication in open access journals.
  • All Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students who are currently enrolled or employed at VT are eligible.
  • OASF support is not available if a grant supported the research upon which the article is based.
• Journals
  • Hybrid journals are not supported (that is, subscription journals offering an OA option), to avoid double charges to the library, and because hybrid journal fees are generally higher on average than those for fully OA journals.  Please note that you can decline the OA option, and provide free, no-embargo access to your accepted version by using Virginia Tech's Open Access Policy.
  • The OA journal's publisher must be a member of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) or comply with a similar Code of Conduct.
  • OA journals should be registered in an open access directory such as the Directory of Open Access Journals or Sherpa/Romeo.
• Funding
  • The funding limit is $1500 per article.  The fund can now cost-share with departments.
  • Authors are limited to $3000 in funding per fiscal year (July-June). For papers with multiple Virginia Tech co-authors, the OASF still subsidizes the same total amount of up to $1500 per article but the support is pro-rated among each of the VT authors for the purposes of calculating amounts towards the annual limit for individuals. For example, an article request for $1500 with 3 Virginia Tech co-authors would be pro-rated at $500 each.
  • Funding will be disbursed to authors upon approval and in the order in which they were received until such time as all available funds are exhausted in a given fiscal year.
  • Invoices for funded articles must be received by the Libraries' acquisitions unit head within 45 days of the award notification. Otherwise, the funds will be returned to the OASF and the author(s) must reapply. If your article’s publishing charges are waived by the journal, or the OASF award is no longer needed for any reason, please let us know so we can release those funds for other authors.
  • Do not pay charges on a personal credit card.  We cannot reimburse such expenditures.
• Other
  • Please note that no-cost, embargo-free open access for accepted versions of scholarly articles is available to all VT researchers thanks to Virginia Tech's Open Access Policy, approved by the Board of Visitors on March 22, 2021.  Accepted versions are available in VTechWorks, which receives over 3,000 downloads per day from around the world.
  • Check the Discounts tab above for active publisher agreements and memberships, which cover some or all of a journal's APC.
  • Questions about the fund can be sent to oasf-g@vt.edu.

Guidelines edited April 23, 2024 (PY)