The Office of Public Records charges for the actual cost of making public records available. Fees are based on the amount of staff time involved (calculated based on hourly rate of pay and benefits), a per-page fee for photocopies, and any mailing or delivery charges. Staff time includes locating, gathering, reviewing, summarizing, compiling, copying, monitoring (if a request is made to inspect records on-site), tailoring and redacting the public records.

A breakdown of how benefits (referred to here as blended OPE) are calculated for various University employee categories can be found here. A full list of fees charged by the University can be found here. 

Fee Reductions or Waivers

Public Interest: The Office of Public Records may reduce or waive fees when fulfilling public records requests that benefit the interests of the community or society as a whole, ORS 192.324(5). If you would like to apply for a fee waiver, please provide a statement that conveys how your request meets this requirement and thus justifies redirecting the public’s resources away from the University’s primary mission of education to absorb some or all of the cost of your request.

Simple Requests: The Office of Public Records may waive the fee for fulfilling non-commercial, simple requests that clearly require less than one hour of university staff time. Because even straightforward requests incur administrative and institutional costs, typically no more than two fee waivers for such requests will be granted to any individual requestor within a calendar month.

Exceptions: Public record requests made for commercial purposes are ineligible for fee reductions or waivers.

In instances where multiple requestors make identical requests, or mirror requests made by others, the Office has a practice of charging each requestor the actual cost to respond to the request. If multiple payments are then received for the request, the Office refunds each requestor a proportionate amount of the fee.

Multiple requests from a single individual, or requesting agency, that are substantively similar in nature will be considered a single request for purposes of assessing a fee.