Open Access at UT Austin

The memberships and initiatives below provide direct benefits to UT authors. If you are being asked to choose a Creative Commons license and would like more information about what that means, see our Creative Commons LibGuide or contact Colleen Lyon.

UT Libraries (UTL) has an agreement with Cambridge University Press that includes unlimited open access (OA) publishing for UT Austin corresponding authors. To be eligible, the articles must be original research (research articles, review articles, rapid communications, brief reports and case reports). Please note that choosing the OA option does NOT cost you anything and does not cause an incremental increase in the cost of UTL’s agreement with Cambridge.

Here is some brief information about what the steps to OA publication look like:

1. Complete Author Publishing Agreement
   1. Upon acceptance of your article, you will be sent an email and asked to complete an Author Publishing Agreement. Within this form, you will be able to select your Creative Commons license. When you return the form, that will trigger an email from Rightslink-CCC (usually within 48 hours).
2. Complete the Rightslink process
   1. If you do not already have an account with Rightslink, you’ll need to create one.
   2. You should see an option to seek funding from your institution for OA publication. Choose that option and continue. That will trigger an email to UTL to approve the request. Again, choosing OA does not cost you or UTL any additional money.
3. Once the approval is complete, you will receive an email confirmation and your article will enter production.

UT Libraries (UTL) has an agreement with PLOS that includes unlimited open access (OA) publishing for UT Austin corresponding authors in all 12 PLOS journals. In order to qualify for the fee free publishing with PLOS, your article must be accepted for publication on or after 3/1/2023, and you'll need to identify the University of Texas at Austin as your institution during the submission process.

Here is some brief information about what the steps to OA publication look like:

• You'll be able to select institutional funding for APCs in the Additional Information step of the article submission process.
• In that step, there is a Publication Fees section.
• Click the radio button for "My institution will fully or partially pay the fee as a member of the PLOS Institutional Account Program".
• After clicking that radio button, a drop down menu will appear and you'll need to select the University of Texas at Austin from that list.

UT Austin has a contract with Sage Publishing that allows all UT corresponding authors to publish open access for no fee in over 1000 Sage subscription and gold open access journals. In order to be eligible, the articles must be accepted for publication on or after 1/1/2023.