Institutional Membership
Regardless of whether you are a principal investigator, director of a lab or small research unit, a department chair, serials acquisition librarian, director of knowledge dissemination of an Institution, PR/communications director of a company or dean of a university, you should consider purchasing an institutional membership with fee waivers for your organization.
Institutional membership (sometimes called subscriptions) offer many benefits, such as APF waivers and showcasing the research of a specific department or research group by aggregating them on a research group homepage. This is an excellent tool for department chairs, lab heads, or principal investigators to encourage publication of their faculty/students in JMIR journals.
APF Waivers
Institutional memberships (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.
This waiver applies to your faculty or students or employees of your organization - they can publish in JMIR journals free of charge.
Please note that this waiver does not apply to:
- Fast track fees
- Peer-review fees for protocol peer reviews
- Sponsored tweets
Faster Publication
Because we do not have to wait for an APF to be paid, we can move the paper to production/copyediting immediately after acceptance. On the other hand, if we wait for institutional payments, we often have to wait 2-4 weeks or longer until these payments are received.
Savings
The membership prices are structured so that they lead to significant savings if you plan to publish 2 or more articles within the next 3 years. For example, a 3-year Silver membership costs $6000 but covers the APF for up to 3 articles, which is an $8850 value with current APF prices.
Future Publications
Memberships can be between 3-10 years in duration and essentially pre-pay for future articles which can be published free of charge. Institutional memberships are useful for individual researchers and principal investigators if a research grant is ending, and there are future publications that could be funded by this grant.
Homepage
Institutional members get a homepage (TOC) like this listing all papers published under the membership scheme. This showcases the productivity and impact of your research group.
i-Silver Membership: Institutional membership without being tied to an institution
The i-Silver membership program (Individual Memberships with APF waivers) is similar to departmental memberships, but membership is tied to an individual researcher rather than departments, ie we waive APFs for any manuscripts where the individual member is an author or co-author.
There are further advantages to the i-Silver membership program, for example: the individual member can change affiliations and still get APFs waived.
Individual membership with APF waivers also enables you to use your current funding to support APFs for up to 10 years into the future. Your personal APF waiver program may also encourage colleagues to work with you on a publication.
Customized Deals/Institutional Agreements
An example of an existing (custom) institutional arrangement is the agreement with the University of California (APF Support for Corresponding Authors from the University of California). Details of institutional membership are negotiable.
For JMIR staff: