Effective January 1, 2023, Mason researchers will have more opportunities to publish journal articles Open Access (OA) at no cost. VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, is launching three new read and publish agreements, so-named because they cover subscription (or read) access to journals plus OA publishing costs (article processing fees or APCs) for those journals.  

Agreements with Cambridge University Press and the International Water Association run through December 31, 2025. A pilot, two-year agreement with Institute of Physics ends December 31, 2024. 

VIVA already has OA agreements with Wiley, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Rockefeller University Press. For more information about APC discounts through VIVA, visit this page.  

To benefit from VIVA’s OA agreements, a Mason author must be listed as the corresponding author using their gmu.edu email address. These agreements cover most, but not all, journals from each publisher. 

In addition to participating in VIVA’s read and publish agreements, Mason Libraries offers an Open Access Publishing Fund to offset the cost of OA publishing. The Libraries also supports OA publishing through contributions to MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) book publishing program, and through institutional support for ArXiv, the Directory of OA Journals, and Ergo: A Journal of Open Access Philosophy. 

Questions? 

Contact the Collections Strategy Department at libcoll@gmu.edu, or reach out to your subject librarian.