Open Access Publication Fund for books

The University of Graz supports its researchers in making their research results Open Access. The Publication Fund provides funding for the publication of Gold Open Access books.

Funding requirements

• You are an author/editor of the publication and a member of the University of Graz.
• You have registered an ORCID iD.
• The publication costs cannot be fully covered by third-party funding (e.g. from the FWF).

Characteristics of the publication

• Your publication has gone through an appropriate reviewing process by experts in the field, e.g. by peer review or editorial review.
• The publisher guarantees that your publication will be freely accessible immediately upon publication (Gold Open Access), published under a Creative Commons licence and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and an ISBN.
• The publication should comply with the Recommendations on Quality Standards for the Open Access Provision of Books and be listed in the Directory of Open Access Books.
• It is made clear in the publication that you are affiliated with the "University of Graz" (see Affiliation Guidelines), and an acknowledgement refers to the funding by the University of Graz.

If these requirements are met, please submit a funding request (available in German only) including the completed information on the book form as well as at least one publishing offer. Two offers from different publishers are preferred. The form Publishing Offer for an Open Access Book Publication must be completed by the publisher as part of the funding request. The submission deadline for the funding decision is the 15th of each odd month (15.1., 15.3. etc). Provision of funding depends, among other things, on the availability of sufficient resources from the Publication Fund. The amount of funding is decided on a case-by-case basis.

Applications should be submitted at least three months before the publishing contract is signed. Please note that publication costs that have already been paid cannot be refunded.

Further information

• Your work is an original publication in the form of a monograph or an edited volume with a clear thematic focus.
• Festschrifts, textbooks, non-fiction books for a non-academic audience, reprints, new editions, etc. as well as works of exclusively local interest will not be funded.
• Exceptionally, funding can also be granted for dissertations, provided that they have been assessed as particularly high quality, revised for book publication, and peer-reviewed and are relevant to a wider academic public. Master's and Bachelor's theses are published free of charge on the unipub Open Access repository and are not eligible for funding.
• Funding is awarded on the basis of competitive criteria; there is no entitlement to funding.
• Funding that has been approved can be claimed for two years from the date of approval, provided that the applicant is also a member of the University of Graz at the time of publication of the funded work.
• Each funded publication will be uploaded to the unipub repository.
• In contrast to Open Access costs and general publication costs, costs for the production of print copies cannot be covered.

If you have any questions, please contact the Publication Services Department at the University Library.

Workflow

1. You submit a funding request for an Open Access book with the attachments as specified. To do this, please fill out the funding request form and attach the completed information on the book form as well as publishing offers from at least one, preferably two publishers.

2. The University reviews funding requests every two months and notifies you and the head of your academic unit whether and to what extent the publication costs may be covered. If funding is granted the Publication Services department will send you the standard wording for the acknowledgements that must be included in the publication.

3. You send the contact details of the publishing house to the Publication Services department as soon as the costs are to be paid to the publisher.

4. The Publication Services department will provide the publisher with the necessary invoicing data based on the SAP order (order number and invoicing address).

5. The publisher sends the invoice to the Central Registry department. (If you receive the invoice directly from the publisher, please inform the Publication Services department of the University Library and do not pay the bill from your own funds!) The invoice is processed in the electronic invoice workflow.

6. Publication costs that exceed the funding granted by the University Library will by default be debited from the account of your academic unit as specified in your funding request.

7. As soon as your book is published please inform the Publication Services department of the University Library. Your publication will be uploaded to the repository unipub.