What is an institutional (departmental) membership and how can I create one?

Institutional membership (sometimes called subscriptions) are usually in the name of a department, lab, research group or institution (university, company etc.) and offer benefits such as APF waivers as well as many other intangible benefits such as showcasing the research of a specific department or research group by aggregating them on a research group homepage (Why should I consider an institutional membership?).

• Institutional memberships with fee waivers (for example Gold and Silver memberships) allow authors affiliated with that institution/department/research group to publish articles without paying an Article Processing Fee (APF) after acceptance.
• • The membership prices are structured so it leads to significant savings if you plan to publish 2 or more articles within the next 3 years.
  • This is an excellent tool for department chairs, lab heads, or principal investigators to encourage publication of their faculty/students in JMIR journals.
  • Institutional memberships can also be useful for individual researchers and principal investigators if a research grant is ending (there is a deadline for spending research grants by a certain deadline), and future publications are still expected and should be funded by this grant 
  • Institutional members get a homepage (TOC) like this listing all paper published under the membership scheme
• Institutional memberships without fee waivers (for example Bronze membership) afford only PDF access to JMIR papers. PDFs are downloadable by members based on IP-range recognition (comparing the IP address of the client against the IP-range of the institution which has a membership), or, for personal memberships, based on login. For non-members, PDFs need to be purchased (How to purchase a single article PDF?)

In order to request an institutional membership, please first login (or create a JMIR account), then click on the blue SELECT button next to any of the institutional memberships and fill out the resulting form which will be displayed. The Subscription Manager will take care of setting up your subscription and you will be notified by email when it is ready.

Once the subscription is set up, you can log in again to see an invoice and make a payment, see How to initiate (pay for) an institutional membership.

See also:

Institutional Membership Types (JMIR Website) - contains the "fine-print"

List of current institutional members with number of current submissions/publications (JMIR website)

Related:

• Why should I consider an institutional membership? 
• How can I find out if my organization is already a JMIR institutional member
• When can I process an article under an institutional membership so that the APF can be waived?

For JMIR staff:

• (for staff) How to add / create an institutional (departmental) membership