Research funders and Open Access
Many research funders have issued their own open access (OA) policies to enable freedom of access to the scholarly outputs of the projects they fund. Funded authors are supported in various ways when publishing open access.
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Research Funders' Open Access Policies
When writing your grant application, please take the open access policy of your prospective funder into account so that you can plan appropriate budgets for publication costs. SherpaJuliet presents summaries of funder open access policies with helpful links. On this website you will find information on how selected sponsors support you. If you need information about a funder which is not represented here, please contact us.
If direct financial support from your funder is no longer possible, you should find out about the support from your institution.
Plan S & cOAlition S
Funders who have signed the 10 principles of Plan S are members of cOAlition S - including the European Commission, the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council (UKRI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
From January 2021, funded authors are obliged to publish one of the two following versions of their journal article open access, with a CC BY licence* and without any time delay (embargo):
- a) Publisher version (often subject to a fee)
- b) Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in an open access repository (e.g. the repositories of FU Berlin and Charité - Refubium)
Some funders base the start date of 2021 on when a journal article is submitted to the journal, others on the 2021 start of a funded project or launch of a funding program. For information on how individual funders define the start date for their Plan S editions, see the cOAlition S implementation webpages.
Immediate open access is possible in journals which are 100% open access or also in hybrid journals, provided the latter have credible transformation plans. The cOAlition S provides a Journal Checker Tool that allows quick orientation as to which journals are Plan S-compatible.
*Please see the Creative Commons website for information about Creative Commons licenses and the CC BY license.
German Research Foundation (DFG)
Within the framework of a DFG-funded project, funds for publication can and should be applied for. These are up to a maximum of 750 EUR per year (or in the case of a book publication 5.000 EUR), but can also be accumulated over the entire duration of the project. Recipients of grants are requested to use these funds for open access publications wherever possible. „Grey literature” will not be funded.
Further details can be found in the DFG guidelines (in German).