Voluntary Author Contributions

Some of our journals are open to accepting Voluntary Author Contributions (VACs) for the publication of an author's article. If you have submitted your article to a participating journal, or are thinking of doing so, the below information applies.

Authors who have access to institutional funds or grant funding earmarked for Open Access publication (via a research grant or through their institution's department or library)—and only those authors—are asked to use those funds to cover the £450 VAC of their publication. If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators, grant officer, and institution library, as publication funds may be available to you. Authors without access to such funds will be asked to request a waiver through the submission system. This waiver will then be associated with the submission.

The VAC is genuinely voluntary. Whether or not the author is able to contribute makes absolutely no difference to editorial decision-making on the submission. We intentionally use the term 'VAC' to sharply distinguish this from an Article Processing Charge (APC), a fee that is required for publication at most Gold Open Access journals. OLH journals are emphatically Diamond Open Access: we do not charge obligatory fees to either readers or authors, in the interest of scholarly equity. Publishing costs for all OLH journals are met via an international network of more than 340 universities, public libraries, organisations, library consortia and research funding bodies/councils such as the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The VAC, if the author is able to make one, would cover all publication costs (editorial processes; web hosting; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc.) and ensure that all of the content is fully open access. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and helps the journal to be run in a sustainable way.

Authors are made aware of VACs at the point of submission, however if the article is accepted into the journal and published, authors who have not already requested a waiver from OLH will receive a VAC request email along with information on how a voluntary contribution can be arranged. If the author's VAC situation has changed in the process of acceptance through to publication, a VAC waiver can still be requested at this point.

If you have any questions, please email paula.clementevega@bbk.ac.uk.

If your institution is not currently supporting OLH, we request that you ask your librarian to sign up. The OLH is extremely cost effective and is a not-for-profit charity. However, while we cannot function without financial support and we encourage universities to sign up, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.