OpenAccess@StAndrews

There are only three months left to claim funding for Open Access via the European Commission's Post Grant Pilot scheme.

A total of €4 million have been allocated to the Pilot, designed to support open access publishing for EU FP7 projects that have finished no longer than 2 years ago. FP7 stands for Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, and this was the EU's main research funding scheme. Between 2007 - 2013 over €50 billion was invested in research projects via the scheme.  FP7 was eventually replaced with Horizon 2020 in 2014, which saw the budget increase to over €80 billion. The EC have stated that the Pilot will run until the funds are exhausted, but it also has a deadline which was recently extended to 28th February 2018. Access to the scheme is dependent on meeting certain criteria, all of which are outlined here https://www.openaire.eu/technical-requirements. Generally however, if your EU FP7 grant ended in the last 2 years, and you&#…

Following a process of consultation. the four UK funding bodies have published their decisions on several areas of the Research Excellence Framework (REF2021). The document provides guidance on staff, outputs, UoA structure and impact, and has taken account of responses from the HE sector.

In the area of Open Access for publications, evidence from a recent survey shows that significant progress has been made towards the REF OA policy intent to increase substantially the proportion of research that is made available open access in the UK.

Over 80 per cent of outputs in scope of the REF policy met the open access requirements in the first year (to April 2017), or an exception applied. 

To build on this progress, the funding councils have confirmed that the REF OA Policy will "require outputs to be deposited as soon after the point of acceptance as possible, and no later than three months after this date"*. This underpins the message most institutions have continued to use to en…