Physics and Maths info @ Imperial College London Library

The BioMed Central pre-pay membership will not be funded by the Library after 30^th August 2008. After this date, BioMed Central open access fees must be paid from an alternative source.

Alternative sources of funding

The majority of biomedical research funders support open access and have grouped together to form the UKPMC Funders group. As a result, you can either include open access publication fees as a directly incurred cost in your initial grant application (RCUK) or apply for additional funding to publish open access at the point of publication (e.g. Wellcome). Funder policies are summarised on the Sherpa JULIET website. A claim form for Wellcome Trust grant holders can be found on the library website.

Another way …and it is free

If you publish with BioMed Central, your only option is to pay to publish open access, however other publishers allow authors to self-archive an electronic copy of a published paper in Spiral, Imperial’s institutional repository, or UK PubMed Central, a subject based repository for biomedical science. There is no charge to self-archive but it is at the discretion of publisher or copyright holder. You must therefore check the publishing agreement you signed or use the Sherpa RoMEO website to see the publisher’s current policy. For many research funders (e.g. bbsrc), self-archiving is either the preferred or an equally acceptable way to make research papers available as open access.

If you would like to know more about open access, ask a question or send the library feedback, please consult the open access section of the library website or email the library library@imperial.ac.uk