2024 URI Open Access Fund Committee Final Report

At the University of Rhode Island (URI), the URI Open Access Fund Committee met in early 2024 to advise the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs on the continuation of the URI Open Access Fund. The URI Open Access Fund was created in 2013 to reimburse URI authors for Article Processing Charges when they published in qualifying Open Access journals and had no other funding available. The committee examined the current Open Access publishing landscape and consulted with two other institutions on their practices. The report of the committee offers the following six recommendations: 1) The URI Open Access Fund should be retired; 2) Hire a Scholarly Communications Librarian to educate faculty on options for making their work open access, on article-level metrics, demonstrating and enhancing the impact of their scholarship, etc.; 3) Encourage URI faculty to make their articles open access by depositing their manuscripts in DigitalCommons@URI in compliance with the URI Open Access Policy; 4) Continue to support Diamond OA initiatives and Subscribe to Open options that provide OA with no author-facing charges and offer alternatives to the large, for-profit academic publishers; 5) Consider support for the membership models of fully open access publishers, e.g. PLoS, MDPI, Frontiers; and 6) Consider participating in Transformative Agreements through consortia such as Lyrasis. A short bibliography is included.