The University of Birmingham maintains institutional open access prepaid accounts with several commercial publishers of fully open access journals. The funds contained within these accounts are allocated to cover article processing charges for approved manuscripts resulting from research conducted at the university.
University staff are advised to follow the procedures outlined below when manuscripts are ready for submission, as outputs matched to our accounts without prior approval will be rejected.
Prepaid agreements by publisher
- BMJ (unfunded research in fully OA journals only)
- Frontiers Media
- PeerJ
- SAGE publishing (fully OA journals only)
- Springer Nature, including BMC (fully OA journals only)
Eligibility criteria
If you are a staff member or emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham* and your name will appear as an author acknowledging the University of Birmingham as your primary affiliation (*See the Research Publications Policy for details), you may be eligible for funding to cover open access charges for manuscripts submitted to fully open access journals published by the listed publishers.
If BHF, UKRI or Wellcome Trust funding is NOT acknowledged, and you hold no funding to pay for the open access fee:
- Please review the information provided in the ‘Fee-based full open access’ section of the Publishing open access journal articles intranet page (login required).
If BHF, UKRI, or Wellcome Trust funding is acknowledged, and the relevant block grant funds remain available:
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Check if the journal is listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
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If it appears on DOAJ, and your published article will acknowledge funding from BHF, UKRI or the Wellcome Trust, complete a Staff Open Access fee payment request form.
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If you enter into an agreement with a publisher to pay the open access fees prior to obtaining approval from Libraries & Learning Resources, and your request is subsequently denied, you will be responsible for the payment of the fees.
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Please ensure that full details of all acknowledged funders, including those held externally by any co-authors, are provided to prevent successful applications from being withdrawn due to inaccuracies.
What happens after your funding application?
If, based on the information provided, your selected journal submission qualifies for support from funds managed by Libraries & Learning Resources for the current financial period, you will receive an email confirming the registration of your details. If your submission remains unpublished by the end of this period, you will be asked to provide a status update.
Funds will be released only if the application details can be verified against the information provided by the publisher at the time of editorial acceptance. If there are any amendments to your application, such as a change of primary affiliation or resubmission to a different journal, you must notify us by replying to the confirmation email. We will then assess whether it continues to meet the eligibility criteria.
Procedure to follow
If your funding application is successfully registered, you must also ensure that the publisher match your output to our institutional account to facilitate payment approval upon editorial acceptance.
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Please ensure you list the University of Birmingham as your primary affiliation throughout the manuscript submission process.
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The submitting author must be affiliated with the university and use their bham.ac.uk email address to be matched to our account.
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If asked to reconfirm your affiliation, please ensure that the University of Birmingham is selected.
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For manuscripts accepted by Springer Nature (BMC), select 'Yes' if asked whether you would like to make the output available open access via the University of Birmingham's payment profile.
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For unfunded manuscripts accepted by BMJ, select 'Seek funding from the University of Birmingham' to match your output to our institutional account.
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If you are prompted to raise an invoice, please do not proceed and reply to our confirmation email for assistance.
Any payment requests submitted to our account without prior authorisation will be declined, as it is necessary for us to maintain a proper balance of the funds under our management.
Next steps