Open Access to publications
Guide

How to publish Open Access at the Scuola Normale

The options offered by the Scuola Normale to publish open access.
Immagine anteprima
Open Access to publications
Immagine di testata
Open Access to publications

SNS OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING FUND

Lecturers, researchers, temporary research assistants and PhD students of the Scuola Normale may apply for contributions.

Articles

Requirements to access the fund:

  • The journal in which the author requesting the contribution publishes must be indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or, if recent, must meet the criteria of DOAJ, in order to avoid the so-called "predatory jounals”.
  • The text must be immediately available online after publication and must be deposited in the SNS Institutional research repository (IRIS). 
  • The author requesting the contribution must be the corresponding author and must specify the affiliation to the SNS when submitting the text to the chosen journal.
  • The article to be published must not be the result of research funded by competitive calls which provide for the reporting of publication costs.
  • The contribution of the Scuola Normale must be highlighted in the acknowledgements of the text (for example with the sentence: "This work was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the Scuola Normale Superiore").

Maximum contribution

  • € 3,000 for PhD students and fellows (temporary research assistants)
  • € 2,400 for University researchers, RTD-A and RTD-B
  • € 1,800 for full professors and associate professors 

Any costs of the APC (Article Processing Charges) over the maximum guaranteed will be borne by the research funds available to the author or the co-author, which must be declared in the request.
 
Procedure for submitting an application:

  • Please add the publication to the Institutional Research Archive IRIS, ensuring that all necessary procedures are completed and the final product is submitted. For the publication date, you may choose "in print" and you can upload either the accepted version or the submitted version in .pdf format. The validation of the product will take place after it is published.
  • Remaining within IRIS, make a funding request by clicking on the left-hand vertical menu "Products" > "Publishing services" > "Request" > "New Request" (top left) and fill in the necessary fields, attaching the economic offer or invoice. Please refer to the user guide if needed.

Monographs, curatorships, book chapters

Requirements to access the fund: 

  • The editorial offices at which the author or the curator who is applying for the contribution publishes must be indexed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) or have an online platform for open access publication and submit the texts for peer review. In the case of curatorships or, exceptionally, of books for which peer review does not apply, the issuing of the contribution will be subject to prior consultation with the dean of the author or curator's faculty of appurtenance.
  • The text must be available online in the editorial version immediately after publication and must be deposited together with the metadata in the SNS institutional repository (Archivio istituzionale della ricerca IRIS).
  • The publication for which the contribution is applied must not regard the results of a research project funded by competition calls that involve the possibility of the funding of publication costs.
  • The author is obliged to specify his or her affiliation with the Scuola Normale during the submission of the text to the chosen editorial office.
  • The contribution of the Scuola Normale must be underlined, in the case of both books and contributions to volumes, with the phrase “This work was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the Scuola Normale Superiore”.

Maximum contribution
for books (including the curatorships)

  • € 5,000 for PhD students and temporary research assistants
  • € 4,000 for university researchers, RTD-A and RTD-B
  • € 3,000 for full and associate professors

for contributions to volumes

  • € 2,000 for PhD students and temporary research assistants
  • € 1,600 for university researchers, RTD-A and RTD-B
  • € 1,200 for full and associate professors

Any costs of the BPC (Book Processing Charges) over the maximum guaranteed will be borne by the research funds available to the author or the co-author, which must be declared in the request.

In the case of volumes with several authors or curators, the SNS Fund will fund the percentage of the publication cost corresponding to the percentage of authors or curators belonging to the Scuola Normale (for instance, if a volume was written/curated by four authors/curators, two of whom are of the SNS, the SNS Fund will fund up to 50% of the publication costs of the volume).

In the case of contributions to volumes (including those written by more than one person), the author applying for the contribution must be the “corresponding author”. 

Procedure for submitting an application:

  • Please add the publication to the Institutional Repostory IRIS, ensuring that all necessary procedures are completed and the final product is submitted.
  • Remaining within IRIS, make a funding request by clicking on the left-hand vertical menu "Products" > "Publishing services" > "Request" > "New Request" (top left) and fill in the necessary fields, attaching the economic offer or invoice. Please refer to the user guide if needed.

TRANSFORMATIVE CONTRACTS

Transformative contracts represent a new model of contract between universities and some of the leading international scientific publishers. These contracts regulate both access to electronic journals and the open access publication of articles by affiliated authors and are also defined as "Read and Publish" due to their composition in two instalments, one paid to read and the other to publish. The aim is the gradual shift from a traditional business model based only on subscriptions to read content to one that supports the publication of open access articles.

Through the stipulation of this type of contract, which is in itself "transitory" for the aforementioned reasons, the SNS will no longer pay publishers solely to access the contents, but also to allow affiliated researchers (that is, the corresponding authors) to publish their own open access works in "hybrid" journals (subscription journals in which only some of the articles are open access) of the same publishers, making them permanently available to all.

These contracts do not envisage a pre-established distribution of the APCs to publish in open access among the member institutions. The APCs are used up progressively until the number available nationally is exhausted.

All researchers of the SNS (professors, researchers, research fellows, PhDs, etc.) who are corresponding authors of the articles proposed for publication and who have a formal relationship with the SNS can publish in open access in the context of signed transformative contracts.

The publishers with whom, to date, transformative contracts are stipulated are:

American Chemical Society (ACS)
American Institute of Physics (AIP)
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
De Gruyter
Elsevier
Institute of Physics (IOP)
Springer Nature
Wiley

Go to detailed information regarding the contracts of the various publishers.

SCIPOST

SciPost is an online publishing portal managed by the non-profit SciPost Foundation, supported by organizations that use its publishing services (universities, national agencies, etc.). It publishes open access journals in the fields of Mathematics and Computer Science, Natural Sciences (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry) and Social Sciences at no cost to end users or to authors and guaranteeing a rigorous peer review process. SciPost content is indexed in Web of Science, Google Scholar and INSPIRE.

SCOAP3

Finally, it is possible to publish with open access in some peer-reviewed journals of Particle Physics thanks to the SCOAP3 project, which the Scuola Normale Superiore has joined. The costs of open access publication are borne by the universities and research institutions participating in the project. There is no defined number of APCs: authors affiliated with the universities and participating institutions can publish with open access without limitations and at no cost.

 

OPEN RESEARCH EUROPE

Open Research Europe (ORE) is the platform that the European Commission has made available to authors for the publication of the results of research projects funded under H2020 and Horizon Europe. Submissions of unfunded articles are not permitted at this time. The publication costs of each article are borne by the Commission, at no cost to the authors.

Piano nazionale per la Scienza Aperta
ORE
SciPost
SCOAP3

CONTACTS

Servizio Valutazione della ricerca e Open Science
svr@sns.it

 

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