Scholarly Communication: Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII): Eligibility, Guidelines and Restrictions

If you have previously applied for and received BRII funding, please read this page carefully as eligibility, guidelines and restrictions have changed.

Authors

• Any current UC Berkeley faculty, post-doc, academic staff, or currently enrolled graduate student who has had an open access article, chapter, or scholarly book accepted for publication, and does not have other sources of funds to pay author processing charges.
• The BRII program especially encourages applicants from the humanities and social sciences; graduate students and assistant faculty are also encouraged to apply.

Publishers

• UC Berkeley-based Center, Organized Research Unit or Department publishing an open access book or journal on the eScholarship platform.

• We request that authors or publishers with sufficient funding from grants or contracts not apply for BRII funds.
• We encourage researchers to include a line-item on future grant proposals for dissemination or open access costs.

If possible, we ask that BRII funding recipients include the following statement in their acknowledgements: Publication made possible in part by support from the Berkeley Research Impact Initative (BRII) sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library.

Authors

BRII will provide funding to pay Berkeley authors’ OA article processing charges (APCs), or OA scholarly book (monograph) or chapter subvention fee (collectively, “Fees”) as follows:

• One application per individual per calendar year.
• Fees will be subsidized only for fully open access journals or books (that is, the entire journal or book must be freely available to the public without a subscription or access fee). Please note that BRII no longer covers Fees for "hybrid" (subscription-based) journals that simply offer an OA option. However, BRII will finance Fees for OA scholarly books that also sell print copies, provided the publisher makes an online version of the book entirely free.  
• For OA journal articles or chapters within OA scholarly books:
  • BRII will fund up to $2500 in Fees.
• For OA scholarly books:
  • BRII will fund up to $7500 in Fees. Please note: These OA book subventions are being piloted in 2017, and are expressly capped at funding three monographs in total for this first year.
• Applications can be made only after the article, chapter, or book has been accepted by the publisher.  Please submit your BRII application within 8 weeks of publisher acceptance (for article APCs) or upon contract signing (for book proposals).

Publishers

• BRII will provide the following levels of support for UC Berkeley-based Publishers:
  • up to $3000 for per OA book, per calendar year
  • up to $4000 for a journal, per calendar year. Please note that journal publishers may re-apply for funding but priority will be given to those journals that have not previously received funding.
• All reimbursement requests must be made within 6 months of the date of BRII application approval. We understand that the publication process can be long so we are willing to extend this 6 month deadline but it is up the the applicant to request an extension within 6 months of the application’s approval.