The University of Wisconsin-Madison has become the latest institution to established a fund to support open access publication fees and digital publishing by faculty and academic staff. This fund will be managed by a new Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing (OSCP). The OSCP’s website also includes a wealth of information about open access publishing for authors at the university.

UW-Madison, with an enrollment of  more than 40,000 students and staff and an annual budget of more than US $2bn, is one of the largest institutions so far to have taken this step. In doing so, it joins the University of Nottingham and the University of Amsterdam which have each recently set up similar open access funds.

UW-Madison deserves to be congratulated on its forward thinking. Institutional open access funds such as this are a natural next step in the evolution of institutional funding models to support the continuing growth of open access. They help to enable a progressive transition from the traditional model, under which institutions must pay for limited access to research, towards an open access model in which these same funds can instead be used to ensure universal dissemination of an institution’s research output.

View some of the latest open access research published by UW-Madison researchers in BioMed Central journals.

Updated 20th August.