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SciPost Supporting Partners

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Manage Partners
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Openness at strictly minimal cost: the role of professional academics

A fundamental principle underlining all of SciPost’s activities is openness. This means in particular that SciPost guarantees free online access to all publications in all its Journals (free for readers; all articles are published under the terms of a Creative Commons license (most commonly CC-BY)), and does not charge any article processing fees for publishing (free for authors). All editorial activities are performed by professional academics as part of their normal professional duties: contributors to SciPost are demonstrably dedicated to serving their community, and to realizing the dream of true openness in scientific publishing. SciPost thus achieves the highest possible standards of academic quality and open accessibility while maintaining costs at the lowest achievable level.

Financing and sustainability: the role of institutional backers

Besides relying on the dedicated service of professional scientists for many of its day-to-day operations, SciPost must additionally rely on institutional backers for sustaining its professional-level publishing facilities and other activities. This backing is sought primarily from the organizations which are positively impacted by its activities, directly or indirectly: (inter)national funding agencies, universities, national/university/research libraries, academic consortia, governments and ministries, foundations, benefactors and further interested parties. This financial backing cannot take the form of article processing charges or journal subscriptions, due to SciPost’s operating principles: rather, Supporting Partners provide operating funds to SciPost via donations, these funds being pooled in order to cover maintenance and operation of the web infrastructure at SciPost.org, administration of all site-related activities, production of publications in SciPost Journals and development of new publishing-related services for the international scientific community.

Supporting Partners Board

We hereby cordially invite interested parties who are supportive of SciPost's mission to join the SciPost Supporting Partners Board by signing a Partner Agreement.

Prospective partners can query for more information about Membership by filling the online query form.


The Partner Agreement itself contains a detailed presentation of the Foundation, its activities and financial aspects. What follows is a summary of the most important points.


The set of all Supporting Partners forms the SciPost Supporting Partners Board (SPB). Acting as a representative body, the SPB’s purpose is to provide the main financial backing without which SciPost could not continue carrying out its mission, to counsel it in all its operations and to help determine the initiative’s development priorities.

The SPB has a yearly virtual general meeting, organized and chaired by a representative of the SciPost Foundation. During this meeting, SPB-related topics are discussed, recommendations to the SciPost Foundation can be put forward and voted on by Partners, and general issues on any of SciPost’s activities can be discussed.

Types of Partners

Supporting Partners can for example be:

Partnership benefits

All funds originating from Supporting Partners are used to provide services to the academic community as a whole: SciPost operates in a completely open fashion, and the fulfillment of the Foundation’s mission benefits academics worldwide, without any distinction.

Despite the fact that all its services are provided openly, SciPost nonetheless provides its Partners with a mark of appreciation and recognition for their donations in the form of:

Financial contribution

For the financial year 2017, the contributions are set to yearly amounts of:
(Inter)national funding agency:  size-dependent tailored agreement
University/library:  €1000 (base; more is greatly appreciated)
National consortium of universities/libraries:  10% bulk discount on the above
(e.g. €3600 for 4 universities)
Foundations/benefactors:  (Partner-set amount of at least €500)

Note that if the consortium itself is not a legal entity, each individual member must sign a separate Agreement.

All amounts are exclusive of VAT, which will be payable by the Partner where applicable.

Sustainability - This norm allows sustainable functioning of SciPost under the expectation that individual institutions be associated to between two and three full publications per year on average (computed using authorship fractions). A Partner who is associated to more authorships and/or who generally recognizes the value of SciPost’s activities, is of course welcome to contribute more.

Donations - Contributions of less than €500 per year are treated as incidental donations and do not lead to the obtention of Partner benefits.

Note that SciPost has been designated as a Public Benefit Organisation (PBO; in Dutch: Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling, ANBI) by the Dutch Tax Administration. Natural and legal persons making donations to a PBO may deduct their gifts from their Dutch income tax or corporate income tax (see the PBO page of the Dutch Tax Administration).

Activation procedure

In order to become a Supporting Partner, one must:

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Partners

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Prospective Partners

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