Over the last few years, funders and research institutions worldwide have introduced policies in support of open access. These policies often include a recommendation or a requirement for articles to be deposited in the institution’s repository. An increasing number of institutions also now provide a central fund to help cover article processing charges for open access articles.

It can be difficult to keep track of all these policies and resources, which is why BioMed Central created institutional and funder open access policy pages to help bring this information together.

We are pleased to announce,  as part of Open Access Week 2013, that we have now extended  this system so that researchers coming from an IP address of a recognized institution are now automatically shown links to their institution’s OA policy page, OA repository, and central OA fund, along with details of any BioMed Central Membership arrangement. This information is displayed when visiting the BioMed Central or SpringerOpen homepages (As shown in the image below),  and is also provided during the manuscript submission process. By providing researchers with direct links to their institution’s open access resources, we hope to further reduce the barriers to the uptake of open access publishing.

We have already added information on hundreds of institutions, including all members of the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE). However, the database is still not fully comprehensive. If your institution has an OA policy, OA repository or central OA fund in place and details are not showing up when you visit the BioMed Central homepage, please let us know at info@biomedcentral.com and help us fill the gaps.