The Office of the Provost this year has allotted money to the Provost's Open Access Fund, a grant given to Tufts faculty members for the purpose of encouraging open access publication and digitization of research and scholarship.
The fund, initiated in 2009 by then-Provost JamshedBharucha, had a well-received pilot run in 2011 and awarded grants to a total of 13 faculty members, according to Deborah Kaplan, digital resources archivist and co-chair of the Scholarly Communication Team (SCT) at Tufts.
"The idea is that we assist the faculty in making their work easier to access and available for free to the scholarly community and the greater community of global citizens," she said.
Similar to last year, faculty from the all Tufts campuses can apply for funding in either the Provost's Open Access Publishing Fund or the Provost's Open Access Digitization Fund categories, Kaplan explained.
The Open Access Publishing Fund supports the publication of a faculty member's article in an open access journal, meaning that the article can be accessed free-of-charge online. The Open Access Digitization Fund provides for the digitization of a faculty member's research materials under the condition that the final product is added to the Tufts Digital Library. Bharucha devised the Open Access Fund after attending the Boston Library Consortium's Alfred P. Sloan Foundation summit about open access a few years ago, Kaplan explained.
"He was really excited and thought the idea of open access sounded really great, so he put together a memo of ways in which Tufts could foster open access here on campus," she said. Applications for this round of funding opened last week and will conclude in early April, according to Martha Kelehan, social sciences bibliographer for Tisch Library and co-chair of the SCT. Funding will be awarded on a first-come first-serve basis, and faculty members will be notified in early May if they win the grant.
The application process is fairly simple, she said, adding that faculty members seeking the publishing fund must specify the name of the journal the article will be published in, whether or not the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the amount of money requested.
"Each Tufts school was allowed to make its own requirements for faculty eligibility, but they're all very similar," Kaplan said.
Kelehan believes the university will be able to fund more applicants this year due to the lower cost of publishing articles in hybrid journals, which charge a subscription fee but still offer an open access option for authors.
"Most places that give out these funds do not fund hybrid journals at all," she said. "We are actually kind of bucking the trend a little bit by still wanting to support hybrid open access as well as the DOAJ, which are the true open access journals."
Kaplan hopes that the fund will extend the use of open access to humanities faculty members in particular, since those in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields already publish their research in open access journals more regularly.
"In the humanities, there are only a small number of high-prestige open access journals, and people don't know about them," she said. "We really want to encourage people in the humanities or in [the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy] to contribute to these journals." The SCT will be the first university body to review applications, Kelehan said.
"We administer the fund, look at the applications and make assessments about what matches the requirements," Kaplan said.
The team will then pass on its recommendations to the University-wide Committee on Teaching and Faculty Development. The Office of the Provost makes the final decision about which projects to fund, according to Kaplan. Assistant Professor of Classics Marie-Claire Beaulieu, a past recipient of the digitization fund, was able to build a digital repository of obscure Greek epitaphs with the funding.
According to Beaulieu, the project has promoted more collaboration among faculty, undergraduate and graduate students in the classics department and beyond.
"The digital humanities offer us the possibility of making the documents available to everybody and of showing exactly what it is we do," Beaulieu said.
While this marks only the second year that the fund is being disbursed, Kelehan is confident that faculty will spread the word about the benefits of open access.
"We anticipate that this is something that is going to grow," she said. "Faculty will hear about this and be interested in it."
