Open Access: Funder Requirements

All major Irish and European funders require some form of Open Access to outputs that have been funded via their research grants.  t

Listed below are some of the leading Irish funder's Open Access policies:

• Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) (see below, paths to compliance)
• Irish Research Council (IRC)
• Health Research Board (HRB)
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

And some major European funders:

• European Commission Guidelines on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data in Horizon 2020
• European Research Council (ERC): Open Science

All funder's Open Access policies can be queried using the "Sherpa/Juliet" service. 

Plan S - cOAlition S 

In 2018 a large group of major International funders along with the European Commission and the European Research Council founded 'cOAlition S' and in September of that year published 'Plan S'. Plan S consists of one aim and 10 principles, primarily...

“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”  Source: cOAlition-s.org

Paths to Compliance 

NB: DCU Authors are advised that paths to Plan S compliance (and SFI) include:

• Publishing in a Gold OA journal - SFI "will support a contribution to costs in OA venues or subscription journals with transformative agreements..." See policy 2,b.
• Publishing in a Hybrid journal (only If the journal is under a transformative agreement),
• or publishing in a traditional journal and self archiving the author accepted manuscript  in a subject or institutional repository (e.g. Doras) without an embargo period applied. Given most publishers apply embargo periods, in this instance,  SFI (and cOAlition S) require authors to include the following statement on all manuscript submissions to enable immediate deposit with no embargo: 

‘This publication has emanated from research [conducted with the financial support of/supported in part by a grant from] Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number [ ]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission’.