Summary of other funders' Open Access policies
Below is a summary of the requirements of non-UK funders' open access policy that most commonly fund University of Cambridge researchers.
Funder |
Requirement |
Embargo
|
Funds provided? |
| ERC |
Research outputs and data 'made available' either through self archiving/green open access, or by paying for gold open access. If self archiving/green open access is selected, the accepted manuscript must be made available within an embargo period. Open access fees are eligible costs that can be charged against ERC grants, provided they are incurred during the duration of the project |
6 month STEM 12 months HASS |
Cost must be budgeted into grants |
| Horizon 2020 |
Articles only are mandated to be deposited in a repository either through self archiving/green open access, or by paying for gold open access. If self archiving/green open access is selected, the accepted manuscript must be made available within an embargo period.
|
6 month STEM 12 months HASS |
Cost must be budgeted into grants |
| Gates Foundation |
All Funded Research including articles accepted for publication shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). The Gates Foundation is now a Plan S funder. For more information, please see below.
|
No embargo allowed. |
The funder requires researchers direct invoices to the foundation for payment from their central budget. Invoices should be sent to openaccess@gatesfoundation.org |
| NIH | All investigators funded by the NIH must submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. | 12 months | Publication costs, including author fees, may be charged to NIH grants and contracts on three conditions: (1) such costs incurred are actual, allowable, and reasonable to advance the objectives of the award; (2) costs are charged consistently regardless of the source of support; (3) all other applicable rules on allowability of costs are met. |
What you need to do:
- Budget for OA costs in grant applications, if required by your funder.
- Submit all articles and conference papers to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk on acceptance or when a journal asks you to commit to an OA option – whichever comes first.
- Follow any compliance advice we give you.
ERC
The European Research Council policy was announced in 2012. They require articles and monographs – and associated research data – to be made available within six months of publication for sciences. This is extended to 12 months for arts, humanities and social sciences. The policy states that they encourage institutions to meet the costs of this, but they have not provided any money to do so and there are no Cambridge University funds available. Costs will therefore have to be met from your research grant, and should be budgeted into future grant applications.
Horizon 2020
All Horizon 2020 peer-reviewed articles are covered by Open Access requirements. Monographs, books, conference proceedings and reports are not mandated, but Open Access is encouraged.
The policy requires that either the published article or accepted manuscript be deposited in a repository no later than publication. Maximum embargoes are six months for sciences and 12 months for arts, humanities and social sciences. Data sharing is encouraged but there is no obligation, except for projects covered by the Open Data Research Pilot.
Repository records must include the following metadata:
- the terms [‘European Union (EU)’ and ‘Horizon 2020’][‘Euratom’ and 'Euratom research and training programme 2014-2018’];
- the name of the action, acronym and grant number;
When submitting articles to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk it would be helpful if you included this information in the comments field so we can add it to the record.
Open Access costs are eligible expenses that can be claimed from your research grant and should be budgeted for in grant applications.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation open access policy is changing effective January 1, 2021 to align with Plan S principles. For more detailed information, please read the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Open Access Policy. The policy applies to original research papers and non-commissioned review papers.
It is a requirement of funding that papers covered by the policy will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0), and be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period.
If researchers publish in a hybrid journal that is not covered by a Read & Publish deal, or in subscription journal, they must include a rights retention statement in the submitted manuscripts that states: "This work was supported, in whole or in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [OPPID]. Under the grant conditions of the Foundation, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License has already been assigned to the Author Accepted Manuscript version that might arise from this submission." The licence must then be included on the accepted manuscript, and the researcher is responsible for depositing their accepted manuscript in an open repository, such as PubMedCentral (via their [direct upload dashboard] (https://www.nihms.nih.gov/login/?next=/submission/)
Please be aware that this funder will no longer support open access fees in hybrid journals- the Foundation will only pay fees for articles publishing in Gold Open Access journals.
Plan S have developed a [Journal Checker] (https://journalcheckertool.org/), which provides an overview of which compliant routes are available for a researcher's journal of choice.
NIHR
NIHR requires that NIHR-funded researchers publish their main study findings in a peer-reviewed, open access journal under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0). A copy of the final manuscript of any research papers supported in whole or in part by the NIHR should be deposited with Europe PMC upon acceptance for publication, or within 6 months of publication.
Last updated March 2022