Institutional Membership Policy

Institutional Membership

The Academic Research Community (ARC) Alliance invites non-profit educational and research organizations to become members of the ARC Alliance. Eligible organizations include all non-profit universities, colleges, government research laboratories, and other non-profit research organizations. For-profit organizations are excluded from membership. There is no direct cost of membership for eligible member organizations, and organizations can join and resign membership at any time with no minimum period of membership required. Similarly, the privilege of membership in the ARC Alliance can be revoked if a member institution has not fulfilled the obligations of membership.

The purpose of membership in the ARC Alliance is to build a community committed to the acceptance of a Diamond Open Access publishing model led by scholars from member organizations. All published materials are open access for all, copyright is retained by authors, and costs are minimized and equitably distributed based upon institutional member contributions to knowledge production, peer review, and production through in-kind contributions; no direct transfer of fees or charges occur. Institutional members are encouraged to find creative solutions for contributing to the mission that works for the individual institution and leverages existing capacities and strengths. Contributions can include encouraging scholars to contribute their work, provide peer review, serve in editorial capacities, assistance to production through student or staff contributions, and hosting of journals on institutional servers.

Each ARC Alliance journal will be structured to meet the needs and desires of the scholarly community it represents, including selection of the title, aims and scope, editorial leadership, formatting, proofing or copy-editing solutions, and the development of robust electronic hosting solutions. The ARC Alliance provides workflow templates and examples for successful journals and open-source software and training to efficiently launch, administer, and produce journals that match the needs of an individual scholarly community as well as assisting with journal leadership transitions. The ARC Alliance provides a point of access and promotes all journals.

Advantages of Membership

The advantages of ARC Alliance membership include: (1) assistance for scholars from member institutions to become involved with and/or create a new ARC Alliance journal at no direct cost; (2) free access to journal workflow templates and guidance in launching and maintaining journals; (3) association with like-minded institutions promoting the altruistic, non-profit ARC Alliance model of scholarly publishing; and (4) building a network of organizations able to promote and grow an affordable, high-quality publishing model to support scholars.

Obligations of Membership

The obligations of ARC Alliance membership include: (1) contributions to some combination of knowledge production, peer-review, and production; (2) permitting and encouraging involvement with ARC Alliance journals for members of the organization; (3) valuing of ARC Alliance publications based upon their intrinsic quality and merit; (4) promotion of ARC Alliance content through appropriate electronic institutional resources (e.g., link on library website); and (5) where possible and appropriate, electronic hosting of ARC Alliance journals to help ensure persistent and enduring access to all journals.