In September 2009 five American universities signed the Compact for Open-Access Publication Equity, pledging to support OA journals by paying author-side fees on behalf of their researchers. Participants include Harvard, Cornell, Berkeley, Dartmouth and MIT. Since then three more institutions have signed the compact. The compact states that “Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.”
FAQ on COPE: http://www.oacompact.org/faq/
