[UPDATE - Oct 2026]

The Lingnan OA Fund has been exhausted. We no longer accepting new applications.

The University has established the Open Access Publishing Support Fund (Lingnan-OA Fund) as a pilot fund to support Lingnan authors to publish in Open Access (OA) Journals.

Lingnan-OA Fund aims at:

Offsetting the cost of Article Processing Charges (APC) for Lingnan authors
Supporting the transition to a more sustainable scholarly publishing model
Fostering broader public access to scholarly outputs published by Lingnan authors

Lingnan-OA Fund, administered by the Library, effective from 1 Jan 2024 to 31 Dec 2026, runs on a first-come, first-served basis until the fund has been exhausted. It works on a reimbursement mechanism to fund 50% of the cost of APC or up to a maximum of USD1,500 per article (or the equivalent amount in other currencies) whichever is lower, upon compliance with all funding eligibility criteria.

In order to allow more Lingnan authors to share the benefits of OA publishing, Lingnan-OA Fund would take priority to support those “unfunded” authors who do not have access to or are not able to solicit enough funding to settle APC from other sources, e.g. grants, contracts or other block grants. Researchers are recommended to budget OA publishing expenses in their grant proposal as deemed appropriate.

Funding Eligibility Criteria

1. Author Eligibility

Current Lingnan staff/students of the following categories would be eligible to apply to the Lingnan-OA Fund:
- Current Full-time Academic and Research Staff
- Current Research Postgraduate Students (MPhil or PhD) or Doctorate Degree Students
Submitting staff/students should be the corresponding author of the article concerned.
Submitting staff/students must have an ORCID iD registered in Lingnan Scholars. (Click Here for ORCID iD Creation / Connection)

2. Article Eligibility

Only Peer-reviewed Journal Articles are currently supported
Date of Acceptance for Publication should fall within 1 January 2024 – 31 December 2026
The Article Processing Charges schedule of the journal/article concerned should be publicly accessible.
The publisher of the journal is preferably a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and should be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals
Lingnan-OA Fund would take priority to fund a journal article IF it is indexed in any of the following lists (based on the latest list as of the time when the application is being processed):
- Scopus Indexed Journals
- Web of Science Core Collection (Journals indexed in SSCI, AHCI, SCI, ESCI)
- Lingnan University – Internal Journal Ratings
- 中文社会科学引文索引来源期刊 (CSSCI)
- 臺灣人文及社會科學期刊評比暨核心期刊 (THCI)

3. Use of Fund

Funds are approved on a first-come, first-served basis until it has been exhausted.
Awarded OA Fund can ONLY be used for supporting APC of Open Access publishing. Other Non-OA-related charges, e.g. reprints, translation, colour illustration, over-length / non-open access pages charges, administrative fee or other fees, are NOT COVERED and will NOT be reimbursed.

4. Publication and Attribution

Funded article must have “Lingnan University” as the organisation affiliation.
Funded article should be published under a Creative Commons License, with its full contents must be made freely accessible immediately upon initial publication at no cost to the reader.
If feasible, the fund recipient should add an acknowledgement to the article sponsored by Lingnan-OA Fund: “Partial funding for Open Access was supported by Lingnan-Open Access Publishing Support Fund”.