How to publish Open Access at the Scuola Normale

SNS OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING FUND

Professors, Lecturers, researchers, postdoctoral research staff, undergraduate and PhD students of the Scuola Normale may apply for contributions.

To be eligible for a contribution from the Open Access (OA) Fund the following requirements must be met.

General requirements

• The output must be published in fully open access publishing venues.
• The output must have already passed peer review at the time of the request.
  • The deadline to submit a OA Fund request for outputs reporting results obtained during an affiliation with the SNS is extended up to nine months after the end of the SNS affiliation (PhD degree achievement, end of contract, etc.).
• The output must be immediately available online on the publisher website upon publication and deposited with its metadata in the Institutional research repository (IRIS).
• The output must be assigned a persistent identifier (DOI).
• The author requesting the contribution must be the corresponding author, even in case of multi‑author outputs.
• For Undergraduate students, a covering letter from the student’s academic supervisor is required, and the allocation of the OA Fund contribution is subject to the approval of the Dean of the Faculty to which the author belongs.
• The author must specify affiliation to the Scuola Normale Superiore when submitting the manuscript to the publishing venue.
  The author must provide ORCID in IRIS “Profile” when requesting the contribution from the Scuola.
• The output must not report results from research funded by competitive calls that allow publication costs as eligible expenses.
• The Scuola’s contribution must be acknowledged in the publication (for example: “This work was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the Scuola Normale Superiore”).
• Any amount exceeding the maximum guaranteed for the various publication types will be charged to the author’s available research funds, which must be declared at the time of the request.
• Requests for contributions will be processed in the chronological order of submission until the annual allocation of the OA Fund has been exhausted.
• The maximum annual contribution assigned to each applicant, regardless of the number of publications funded, is € 5,000.

Additional requirements for papers

• The journals in which the applicant publishes must be indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and must not be listed in the online Predatory Journals list.

Maximum contribution for each paper

• € 3,000 for undergraduate and PhD student and postdoctoral research staff
• € 2,400 for University researchers, RTD-A and RTD-B
• € 1,800 for full professors and associate professors 

Go to procedure for submitting an application.

Additional requirements for Monographs, curatorships, book chapters

• The publishers in which the author or curator publishes must be indexed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) or must provide an online platform for open access publication. 
• For edited volumes or, exceptionally, books for which peer review is not foreseen, a prior opinion of the Dean of the author or curator's faculty of appurtenance is required. 
• For open access volumes submitted by PhD students, a covering letter from the student’s academic supervisor is required.

Maximum contribution for each monographs and curatorships

• € 5,000 for Undergraduate students, PhD students and post‑doc research staff
• € 4,000 for university researchers, RTD-A and RTD-B
• € 3,000 for full and associate professors

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).

Maximum contributions for each book chapter

• € 2,000 for Undergraduate students, PhD students and post‑doc research staff
• € 1,600 for university researchers, RTD-A and RTD-B
• € 1,200 for full and associate professors

Go to procedure for submitting an application.

Procedure for submitting an application after the completion of the peer review process, and before the final drafts are sent to the publisher:

1. Please add the publication to the Institutional Repostory IRIS, ensuring that all necessary procedures are completed and the final product is submitted.
2. Depending on the type of publication:
   • Journal article: check whether the journal you intend to publish in is included in the list of journals covered by the transformative agreements signed by the Scuola.
     If the journal is included in the transformative agreements, during the submission process on the publisher’s website, accept the open access publication through the agreement signed by the Scuola (no additional payment is required).
     If the journal is not included in the transformative agreements, within IRIS make a purchase 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.
   • Other publications: within IRIS make a purchase 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 AGREEMENTS

Transformative agreements 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 agreements 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.
 

USEFUL LINKS

Piano nazionale per la Scienza Aperta
ORE
SciPost
SCOAP3
 

CONTACTS

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

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