What is required?
All peer-reviewed scientific publications arising from Horizon Europe funding have to be made available in open access. This implies that publications are to be made freely available online, immediately upon publication and with no restrictions on use, by depositing them on a repository. You should be aware that you are required to retain sufficient intellectual property rights (IPR) to comply with these open access obligations.
There are two ways to ensure immediate open access:
- Deposit your publication in a repository for scientific publications and ensure open access.
- Publish your research in an open access journal.
In both cases you have to deposit your publications in a repository, even when publishing in an open access journal.
How to comply?
All peer-reviewed publications of a project must be made openly available through a repository. Ok, so how do I deposit my publication in a repository?
At the latest at the time of publication (i.e. no embargo period), upload a machine-readable electronic copy of the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication (i.e. Author Accepted Manuscript - AAM; or author's postprint) in a trusted repository for scientific publications, with a CC-BY or equivalent license for articles (at least for the AAM); or with a CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND or equivalent license prohibiting commercial use or derivative works, for monographs and other long texts, with information about any research outputs, tools or instruments necessary to substantiate the conclusions of the scientific publication. Moreover, you must aim to deposit at the same time the research data needed to validate the results presented in the deposited scientific publication.
Metadata of deposited publications must be open under a Creative Common Public Domain Dedication (CC 0) or equivalent, in line with the FAIR principles (in particular machine-actionable) and provide information at least about the following:
- publication (author(s), title, date of publication, publication venue;
- Horizon Europe or Euratom funding;
- grant project name, acronym and number;
- licensing terms;
- a persistent identifier for the publication, the authors involved in the action and, if possible, for their organisations and the grant. Where applicable, the metadata must include persistent identifiers for any research output or any other tools and instruments needed to validate the conclusions of the publication.
You are free to publish wherever you want, but note that an embargo on open access is no longer accepted.
Consider publishing in the Open Research Europe that will allow you to comply with the Open Access EC requirements.
Open Research Europe is an open access publishing platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon Europe funding across all subject areas. The platform makes it easy for Horizon Europe beneficiaries to comply with the open access terms of their funding and offers researchers a publishing venue to share their results and insights rapidly and facilitate open, constructive research discussion.
| Personal websites and databases, publisher websites, as well as cloud storage services (Dropbox, Google drive, etc) are not considered repositories. Academia.edu, ResearchGate and similar platforms do not allow open access under the terms required and are NOT considered repositories. |
Source:
- European Commission, Horizon Europe Programme Guide (contains a dedicated section on open science on page 38)
- European Commission, EU Grants. AGA- Annotated Model Grant Agreement
Which repository to use?
You can use a trusted repository for scientific publications of your choice:
- your institutional repository, OR
- a subject-based/thematic repository (e.g., arXiv, Europe PMC, Phonogrammarchiv, the European Nucleotide Archive or databases of astronomical observations operated by the European Southern Observatory, among others), OR
- Zenodo the OpenAIRE repository hosted by CERN.
Trusted repositories are:
| Certified repositories (e.g. CoreTrustSeal, nestor Seal DIN31644, ISO16363) or disciplinary and domain repositories commonly used and endorsed by the research communities. Such repositories should be recognised internationally. |
| General-purpose repositories or institutional repositories that present the essential characteristics of trusted repositories, i.e.: |
| Display specific characteristics of organisational, technical and procedural quality such as services, mechanisms and/or provisions that are intended to secure the integrity and authenticity of their contents, thus facilitating their use and re-use in the short- and long-term. Trusted repositories have specific provisions in place and offer explicit information online about their policies, which define their services (e.g. acquisition, access, security of content, long-term sustainability of service including funding etc.). |
| Provide broad, equitable and ideally open access to content free at the point of use, as appropriate, and respect applicable legal and ethical limitations. They assign persistent unique identifiers to contents (e.g. DOIs, handles, etc.), such that the contents (publications, data and other research outputs) are unequivocally referenced and thus citable. They ensure that contents are accompanied by metadata sufficiently detailed and of sufficiently high quality to enable discovery, reuse and citation and contain information about provenance and licensing; metadata are machine- actionable and standardized (e.g. Dublin Core, Data Cite etc.) preferably using common non-proprietary formats and following the standards of the respective community the repository serves, where applicable. |
| Facilitate mid- and long-term preservation of the deposited material. They have mechanisms or provisions for expert curation and quality assurance for the accuracy and integrity of datasets and metadata, as well as procedures to liaise with depositors where issues are detected. They meet generally accepted international and national criteria for security to prevent unauthorized access and release of content and have different levels of security depending on the sensitivity of the data being deposited to maintain privacy and confidentiality. |
OpenAIRE can also help you to find the appropriate repository. Find here.
| Did you know? | |
| Other types of scientific publications (non peer-reviewed articles, monographs, conference proceedings, reports, …) are not covered by the mandate, but good practice to make them open as well! | |
How to retain your copyright?
By depositing an accepted version of the publication (aka. Author Accepted Manuscript - AAM; or author's postprint) in a repository, you can immediately make your publication open access if one of the following condition is met:
- you have signed a Copyright Transfer Agreement, but the publisher allows for the AAM or the edited version (i.e. Version of Record - VoR) to be uploaded on a repository.
- you retained your copyright to the published article, by applying the Rights Retention Strategy outlined by cOAlition S.
| Did you know? | |
| Authors may need to interact with prospective publishers, in particular when they publish in venues that are not open access. To facilitate compliance with their open access obligations, researchers are encouraged to notify publishers of their grant agreement obligations (including the licensing requirements) already at manuscript submission. For example, by adding the following statement to their manuscript: “This work was funded by the Εuropean Union under the Horizon Europe grant [grant number]. As set out in the Grant Agreement, beneficiaries must ensure that at the latest at the time of publication, open access is provided via a trusted repository to the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication under the latest available version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public License (CC BY) or a license with equivalent rights. CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND or equivalent licenses could be applied to long-text formats.” If the publishing agreement is contrary to the grant agreement obligations, authors should negotiate its terms and, alternatively, look for a different publishing venue/options. | |
Are publication costs supported?
You are not restricted as to where to publish. You may publish in open access journals, or in journals that sell subscriptions. Some Open Access journals charge authors a fee to publish Open Access (i.e. Article Processing Charges - APC).
Only costs for APC in a fully Open Access journal or platform can be charged to the project.
An APC to publish in a traditional subscription-based journal that offers an OA option (so-called Hybrid journals), will not be covered under the grant. In the case of Article Processing Charges (APCs), you are eligible for reimbursement during the duration of the project. But you should include costs for open access publishing in the budget of your project proposal.
You can avoid APC’s! Making your research open access does not have to cost anything. By depositing your articles in a repository or finding an finding an open access journal that does not charge APCs, you can provide open access for free. EC grant holders can also publish free of charge on the Open Research Europe platform. It is an OA publishing platform created by the EC for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funding across all subject areas.
| Did you know? | |
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The Budget for Publications = Average APC x number of publications. |
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Look at these methods:
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Method 1: |
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Method 2: |
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How can OpenAIRE help?
We make sure your publications are picked up by our infrastructure and send them to the EC so you don’t have to when it is time to report. For example, we link to CORDIS and the EC Participants Portal. We link papers to projects and projects to datasets. You can look up your project page in our EXPLORE portal - where we also include a neat AppBox which allows you to download all project results. Keep in mind though, that it can take several weeks before you see these publications in the reporting portal.
For additional questions you can send your request to the OpenAIRE ask a question service.
The OpenAIRE helpdesk system provides several materials to support you. Please find it in our support page.
