The FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot has recently completed its first year of operation since its launch on May 30th 2015. Over Summer, quite some updates have been released on blogs.openaire.eu. An overview:
Sixth Progress Report
As of June 15th, 2016, the Pilot has committed its first one million euros in funding for Open Access. Half of this has been devoted to Open Access publishing A further block grant of €300,000 is held as pre-paid funds by publishers and institutions. Finally, the alternative funding mechanism for APC-free Open Access journals – whose June 30th deadline for bid submission is quickly approaching – has been allocated €200,000. The budget for these last two items will, of course, be gradually spent over the course of the next few months but it is already into the Pilot accounting.
421 funding requests have been approved as of mid-June, with a growing number of funded books (25) and book chapters (9). Journal articles continue to represent the vast majority of the funded publications (391). The average APC fee for these approved requests for articles and book chapters is €1,424 – a slight decrease compared to previous values. Overall average fees paid are stable and are expected to remain that way.
See the full blogpost and click here for the full progress report.
Implementation of pre-payment agreements with publishers
After funding over 400 Open Access publications during its first year of operation, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is now moving onto the pre-payment agreement implementation stage. OpenAIRE has recently signed agreements and deposited a pre-paid fund with a number of publishers – BioMed Central, BMJ, Copernicus and Wiley – in order to be able to fund eligible manuscripts upon acceptance. This means a much simpler workflow for authors, since no invoice will be required anymore to receive the funding. Instead, the key requirement will be to include the correct FP7 project information in the publishers' manuscript processing systems upon manuscript submission. This is the element that will allow the Pilot to identify the manuscripts that are eligible for funding while they're still under review.
At this point, 383 journals fall under the agreement. The full list can be consulted in this blogpost.
Funded bids for the Alternative Funding Mechanism for APC-free Open Access journals and platforms
Following the call for proposals issued early May to fund APC-free Open Access journals and platforms under the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, 17 bids were received before the June 30th deadline. Once these bids have been assessed by the Pilot team in collaboration with the OpenAIRE technical colleagues, 11 bids have been selected. For a full list, see the original blog post here.
These eleven bids provide a wide geographic coverage for the funding initiative. They also show a rather well-balanced distribution across European regions. The technical improvement plans included in the funded proposals make emphasis on specific areas such as OpenAIRE compliance, providing article-level information to the DOAJ, systematically collecting and exposing the funding information whenever it's made available by authors, producing XML versions of the published articles and implementing ORCID.
Once the improvement plans are completed, short case studies will jointly be produced by the funded stakeholders and the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot describing the enhancement work that has been done with the support of OpenAIRE. These case studies may be released individually or be added as a whole to a report on opportunities for improving the APC-free Open Access publishing infrastructure in Europe. The final goal is that the work carried out under this initiative may eventually benefit all APC-free Open Access journal publishers, including particularly those who submitted bids that were not selected for funding.
Implementing the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot at the University of Milan
Finally, a case study has been released examining the implementation of the Pilot at the University of Milan. A full report, written by Paola Galimberti, can be read on the OpenAIRE blog.
The Università degli Studi di Milano is one of the most successful institutions so far in the implementation of the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot. Ten funding requests for journal articles have been granted to researchers affiliated with Unimi in the first year of the initiative, for a total funding of €10,955. This yields an average APC fee of nearly €1,1000, which is well below the global average for the initiative.