Open Access Agreements

Open Access is now an integral part of the publishing culture within many academic disciplines. The University of Graz supports, funds and facilitates Open Access publishing through, amongst other things, Open Access agreements with publishers. These agreements are negotiated by the University Library within the framework of the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ). Open Access agreements are an investment in the greater visibility of research achievements at the University of Graz and are in line with the university’s Open Access policy.

Open Access agreements generally link the cost of publishing in Open Access journals and licences for access to academic literature. Their aim is to make the costs of publishing, (Article Processing Charges or APCs), and the costs of licensing proportionate to one another. For academics at the University of Graz, this means that they can publish in subscription-based journals that the fall under the agreement at no cost, because the university has already covered the APCs. (PNAS is an exception to this).

The university will not cover the APCs for an article if funds have been earmarked for that purpose as part of the funding for a scientific project.

• You must be a member of the university.
• You must be the corresponding author of the article. As the corresponding author, you are responsible for securing the agreement of all co-authors to Open Access publication and the related CC licence.
• Publishing costs must not already be covered by other subsidies from, for example, the FWF, ERC or FFG.
• The agreement only covers the financing of Article Processing Charges (APCs). Other charges, such as page charges or colour charges, are not covered.
• Submit your article from your University of Graz email address (@uni-graz.at or @edu.uni-graz.at); if possible, from the University of Graz network. This allows publishers to identify submissions as eligible for funding.
• Follow the University of Graz affiliation guidelines when stating which institution you belong to.
• You must cite the funding through the University of Graz in the acknowledgements. The recommended wording is: “The authors acknowledge the financial support by the University of Graz”
• If you, as the corresponding author, are an employee of the University of Graz, you should enter your article in the University of Graz research portal after publication. The platform can be accessed from your UNIGRAZonline business card or at forschungsportal.uni-graz.at. For further information as well as instructions, (German only), please see the Intranet.
• In accordance with the University of Graz Open Access policy, it is recommended that university members make previously published articles available in the institutional repository unipub, as long as there is no severe legal or financial reason not to do so.

You can find the details of the University of Graz’s current Open Access agreements, and the corresponding workflows: