8th progress report for the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot

With just five months to go for this EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, this is a new progress report based on the figures collected as of Nov 30th. At this point, this funding initiative has already funded 700 Open Access post-grant publications arising from 534 completed FP7 projects.

The dataset for the APC payments made thus far that was recently shared with OpenAPC provides revealing graphic snapshots for the project and allows its current results to be compared to those arising from initiatives from other research funders.

Some of the highlights of this 8th progress report are:

• 94% of the funded post-grant publications are journal articles;
• 39 finished FP7 projects have been fully funded, i.e. for their maximum of three post-grant publications;
• In the distribution of approved funding requests by country, two have already surpassed the 100 request threshold, while 16 already have more than 10 funding requests;
• 9 institutions from 7 different countries have already submitted 10 or more funding requests;
• The average APC fee payment remains fairly stable and under the €1,500 mark;
• Marie-Curie Actions are by far the most frequently funded FP7 project type, but the picture changes when the analysis is carried on books only;
• Pre-paid accepted manuscripts keep growing and amount to nearly 40% of the total number of funding requests in the last few months.

Besides the information included in the report, additional qualitative input on both the funding initiative itself and the wider APC-based business model is being collected from authors funded by this FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot as part of the market analysis report that has recently been commissioned.

The 8th progress report for the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is available here.