OA Fund Criteria

• Article Processing Charges (APCs) for peer-reviewed journal articles in a pure open access gold journal. Maximum amount of APC is 2’500 CHF
• Book Processing Charges (BPCs) for reviewed book projects (monographs incl. dissertations, conference proceedings and edited volumes). Maximum contribution to BPCs is 8’000 CHF

• Book Chapter Processing Charges (BCPCs) for individual contributions in reviewed edited volumes published in gold open access. Maximum BCPC funding: CHF 2,500 (excl. VAT) 

• Hybrid open access
• Open access publishing charges that are eligible for support by the SNSF or other research funding organizations
• Open Access Journal articles with APCs higher than 2’500 CHF (excluding VAT)
• Open Access book chapters with BCPCs higher than CHF 2,500 (excluding VAT) 
• APC covered by Read & Publish Deals or Gold OA deals
• Costs for a more open publishing license
• Costs for open access green
• Additional publishing costs (e.g. color charges, page charges) as well as costs for print editions
• Publications in predatory journals and by predatory publishers
• Book Chapter Processing Charges (BCPC) for contributions to encyclopaedias and textbooks
• Subsequent open access publication of books and/or e-books that have already been published and distributed on a commercial basis. Exceptions are possible if no more than six months have passed between the publication and the open access version.
• Publications in journals covered by a current Read and Publish or Gold OA deals, but for which the publication quota has already been reached.   

• Corresponding author must be eligible and apply
• Peer-review or equivalent discipline-specific quality control mechanism
• DOAJ membership (or – in case of a newly founded journal – fulfilling DOAJ criteria)
• The publication is licensed with the Creative Commons (CC) license CC-BY. Please note that we do not accept any more restrictive cc-licences (e.g. CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND).

• Author or editor must be eligible and apply
• The work undergoes a discipline-specific quality control mechanism (such as peer review, editorial review) 
• The publisher is a member of DOAB or OASPA or demonstrably follows their principles.
• The work is published under a Creative Commons (CC) license, preferably CC-BY

• Eligible: Teaching and/or research staff employed by the University of Bern; lecturers (DozentInnen), assistants (AssistentInnen) and doctoral candidates employed by the University of Bern, as well as employees of the Insel-Spital provided they have a university campus account (doctoral candidates and higher). Faculty and emeriti accounts are not eligible.
• Not eligible: employees of the Insel-Spital without a university campus account, emeriti, students and university employees, who are not in positions of teaching and/or research 

• Applicants can submit their application once the bill has been issued by the publisher but before the bill is paid (invoices that have already been paid will not be refunded)
• The invoice must be issued in the current calendar year
• Payment procedure will be communicated to successful applicants along with their notification of funding

Applications must be made online via an application form

A version of record of the funded open access gold publication must be deposited and made available immediately after publication in the University of Bern’s repository BORIS.

The Open Access version of the publication must be easily accessible and prominently displayed on the publishers' site.

The decision regards the eligibility of a funding application rests solely with the management of the publication fund at the university library of the University of Bern

• First come, first served until fund is depleted

• Funding amounts will not be reserved for later payment
• An author can be granted a maximum of 3 applications per semester (In the event that the application volume is very high in the first semester, the fund-management reserves the right to decrease the maximum amount of granted applications per author in the second semester)

• There are no pre-payments
• The publication fund will pay the publisher's bill directly
• Reimbursement to authors or institutes is not possible
• The publisher bill has to contain information about the publisher, the journal, corresponding authors etc. See the recommendations of ESAC (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges)