Allegheny College Open Access Policy

In 2013, the faculty adopted an open access policy for faculty publications to ensure that such publications remain available to students and researchers at the College and to support the ongoing development of open access publishing.

In summary, the policy states:

Allegheny faculty are required to submit a copy of articles completed while they are employed by the College to the College’s institutional repository for the purposes of open dissemination. Pelletier Library is responsible for managing the repository and making scholarly articles available to the college community and to the public to the greatest extent possible.

The policy implies that faculty will negotiate publication agreements that allow for open dissemination when publishing articles. The implication is that such agreements will allow open dissemination no later than the date of publication. In practice, most faculty have been publishing in journals that allow open access after a short embargo, typically 12 months after the publication date.

To review the original policy, consult the Faculty Handbook.

Additional support for faculty publishing and scholarship will be taking place through the Center for Faculty Research & Teaching Excellence. Further details and guidelines are forthcoming as the Center is developed. Please contact Tressa Snyder, Dean of the Library (tsnyder@allegheny.edu) regarding Center support of publishing and scholarship.

Support for Open Access Publications

Pelletier Library covers Article Processing Charges (APC) for the following publishers/journals:

American Chemical Society — includes the following journals:

To learn more about this program, visit PALCI’s page about open access publishing.

Key points:

  1. Allegheny’s agreement is through the PALCI consortium.
  2. You should be the submitting corresponding author.
  3. To ensure that your manuscript falls under Allegheny’s agreement:
    • Make sure your institutional affiliation is correct in the ACS Paragon Plus submission system. Use the dropdown box in Paragon to select Allegheny College.
    • Check that your affiliation is stated in the body of the manuscript as the corresponding author’s affiliation.
  4. After the library approves your open access funding request, your article will be published under a CC BY 4.0 license free of charge.

Association for Computing Machinery

Allegheny is participating in ACM’s OPEN model, which includes waivers for faculty publishing in ACM conferences, journals, and magazines. It does not include co-published conferences or journals.

Learn more about this program at Open Access Publication & ACM.

Key Points:

  1. You must be a corresponding author to participate in this program.
  2. Your primary affiliation must be Allegheny College, and email must be your Allegheny email address. 
  3. When your manuscript is accepted, select the appropriate Creative Commons license following submission of the eRights form. 

SpringerNature – includes over 2000 hybrid journals published by

Allegheny’s agreement does not cover fees for journals that are already fully open access. The goal of this agreement is to transform hybrid journals into fully open access journals. 

To learn more about this program, visit the Open access agreement for Lyrasis or the Lyrasis Transformative Agreement with Springer Nature: A Guide for Authors.

Key Points:

  1. Allegheny’ agreement is through the Lyrasis Consortium.
  2. The following article types are covered in this agreement
    • Original papers – includes original research, original article, original paper or research paper.
    • Review papers.
    • Brief communications.
    • Continuing educations.
  3. You must be the corresponding author of the article.
  4. Your primary affiliation must be Allegheny College and email must be your Allegheny email address. 
  5. After the library approves your open access funding request, your article will be published under a CC BY or CC BY-NC 4.0 license free of charge.

Additional Funding Options

For journals not listed above, the Library will provide up to $2500 to help defray the article processing charges (APC) for articles published in open access journals. To qualify, the journal must be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. For journals with APCs over $2500, faculty may want to contact the Academic Support Committee or Provost’s office for additional support. The Library will decline to fund APCs for articles published in subscription-based journals that will be freely available within 36 months of publication.

Use the Request for Processing Support form to submit your request. If you have any questions, please contact the Associate Director of the Library at bkern@allegheny.edu.

Links to the College’s Institutional Repository

Additional Resources

For more information on Open Access (OA), please see an Overview of Open Access at Wikipedia.

Know your rights when publishing! The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has an excellent resource on understanding your rights, including an author addendum when it is needed.

Last updated: 2023-12-11