OAK Fund Annual Report: 2017-2018

Abstract

The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Fund at Texas A&M underwrites publication charges for scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and monographs published in open access publications in order to encourage the shift to publishing Texas A&M’s research that is free of subscription barriers and support the transition of scholarship towards open science models1 that can help meet Texas A&M’s strategic goals.

Major outcomes for 2017-2018: (1) the OAK Fund distributed funds to 300 faculty, staff and graduate students from 13 colleges/research organizations and five campuses, (2) the OAK Fund supported the publication fees for 77 articles and two book chapters for a total amount of funding distributed of $105,842.

In the past we received a number of communications from TAMU faculty concerning ineligible coauthors, so we made two procedural changes to address these concerns: (1) amended the OAK Fund eligibility rules to allow for support of graduate student authors, and (2) amended the OAK Fund eligibility rules to allow for support of non-TAMU coauthors when a TAMU author is the lead author on the paper as evidence by authorship sequence or corresponding author.