The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) has subscribed to the ChronosHub platform to streamline the University’s open access management (OAM) processes, thus supporting the academic publishing process.
Over the last decade, Wits has more than tripled the number of research outputs published annually, with the share of Open Access (OA) publications increasing even faster. Today, about 50% of Wits’ more than 3,000 research articles are gold or hybrid OA, which require complex processes for handling payments of Article Processing Charges (APCs).
Through the ChronosHub platform, Wits will automate much of the otherwise manual work required to manage the APC invoices. Data collection is facilitated through many integrations with publisher systems combined with AI-technology for scanning invoices. This gives Wits an overview of all APC funding requests across all publishers on a single approval dashboard directly highlighting which approval criteria that are met or not for each invoice. Upon approval, ChronosHub also pays the publishers directly instead of the authors going through a complicated reimbursement process.
Furthermore, the collaboration also includes a journal finder featuring more than 45,000 journals. Here the researchers get guidance on which publishing routes comply with different funding policies and can see if they need to pay any publishing fees, considering Wits’ publisher agreements and conditions for the central APC fund.
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