Open Access Publishing Support
Open access publishing has received considerable attention in recent years and has increasingly become a viable means for faculty, staff, and student authors to make their works available to the scholarly community in a timely manner. A growing number of discipline-specific, rigorous, well-respected, peer-reviewed open access journals are now available to scholars exploring publishing options beyond traditional publishers operating on a customer pay basis. Such journals often embargo article submissions for extended periods of time, thus delaying readers’ access to timely research – an issue that is particularly problematic in the natural sciences.
Faculty, staff, and student authors interested in publishing their works in open access journals are, however, often deterred from doing so because of the considerable article processing charges they have to pay open access publishers for preparing their articles for publication. These fees cover editing, layout design, and other associated work. Depending on the journal, fees may range from $500 to $5,000 for a single article. Processing charges for open access books can range from about $1,500 for a single chapter to $7,000 to $15,000 for an entire book.
Pepperdine Libraries encourages open access publishing and provides Pepperdine-affiliated authors several ways to offset these costs:
- support stipends provided by the the library
- institutional “read-and-publish” agreements with publishers allowing Pepperdine-affiliated authors free open access publishing opportunities
- Digital Commons, our institutional repository
Support Stipends from Pepperdine Libraries
Faculty, staff, and student authors may receive up to $3,000 in total award money each fiscal year. Student authors must collaborate with a Pepperdine professor who can serve either as the primary author (first author listed) or senior author (last author listed).
Up to $2,000 per author per journal article or book chapter per fiscal year (August 1 – July 31)
Up to $3,000 per author per book per year fiscal year (August 1 – July 31)
With their expertise in scholarly metrics and the publishing landscape, library faculty
are eager and ready to work closely with faculty, staff, and student authors to identify
appropriate open access publishers who may be a good fit for their articles, book
chapters, and books.
Institutional “Read-and-Publish” Agreements with Publishers
As a member of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), Pepperdine Libraries is part of several read-and-publish agreements allowing Pepperdine-affiliated authors to publish articles open access at no cost. As part of their agreement, the publishers listed below will cover the article processing charges on research articles accepted for publication in their journals. For articles written by more than one person, the author listed as the corresponding author must be from Pepperdine to be eligible for the article processing charge waiver.
Publishing in Digital Commons, our Institutional Repository
Institutional repositories are open access, electronic archives of manuscripts and articles written by the researchers at specific institutions. Unlike the traditional publishing model, these repositories allow researchers to retain their copyrights to their manuscripts. However, institutional repositories rely largely on voluntary contributions of papers at individual institutions. Many researchers are hesitant to deposit their published manuscripts in their institutional repositories for a variety of reasons, including that the policies of traditionally-published journals regarding local archiving vary. Fortunately, we can include most articles in Digital Commons, Pepperdine's institutional repository! Our librarians are available to help researchers review each journal's rules and embargo period (usually in the 1-2 year range). The benefit to Pepperdine-affiliated authors is that articles that are part of Digital Commons get indexed in Google -- in full text -- thus broadening the reach of their scholarly work.