Requirements from grantors and funders

Both national and international funding bodies, including the EU, require Open Access publication of research results from the studies they support.

Reimbursement of publishing expenses

Making research available Open Access costs money.

In some cases, you can get the publishing costs 100% reimbursed by the research funder - usually on the condition that you have included the cost of Open Access publication in the funding application.

Free Open Access

Another option is to publish in journals that are covered by the national license agreements. The cost of publishing open access is covered under the terms of many of these agreements.

Discounts

Alternatively, you might choose to publish with a publisher that DTU Library has a license agreement with, benefiting from negotiated discounts on Open Access publishing.
You can read more about discounts and free Open Access

Green Open Access (parallel publishing)

If you do not have funds to cover the Open Access publication fees and if you are not eligible for discounts or free Open Access via local or national license agreements, you can upload your accepted manuscript to DTU Orbit.

This is known as Green Open Access.

Green Open Access is free, but publishers typically mandate a waiting period before an article can be made Open Access after publication. This is known as an embargo period. The purpose of the embargo period is to protect the traditional publishing business. The length of embargo periods varies depending on the journal. They typically range between 6 and 24 months.

You can find embargo details for specific journals in Open Policy Finder.

Read about the difference between pre-print, post-print and publisher version

Funder requirements and embargo periods

As mentioned above, both national and international funding bodies, including the EU, mandate Open Access publication of research findings from the projects they support. However, they rarely accept the long embargo periods imposed by publishers.

Requirements from Danish funders

In April 2019, the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Innovation Fund Denmark and the Danish National Research Foundation approved a joint Open Access policy.

According to this policy, scientific articles which are the result of full or partial financing by the funds and foundations must be made freely available to everybody Open Access if permitted by the journals. The funders allow embargo periods of up to 6 months (for the health, natural and engineering sciences).

Open Access policy for public sector research funds and foundations

EU requirements

Since 2007, recipients of funding from the ERC programme have been required by the European Commission to publish their research Open Access.

In the new program, Horizon Europe Open Access is still mandatory for all and remains part of the standard contract with the EU.

As of 2021, Publications must be made Open Access immediately (at the latest at the time of publication) – i.e. embargo periods are no longer accepted.
Read more

Overview of Open Access requirements and embargo periods

Model agreements and appendixes

It is the author's responsibility to obtain the necessary rights in the event that there are discrepancies between the funder's requirements for Open Access and the rights that the publisher grants the author. Typically, there may be disagreement about the length of the embargo period.

It may be a good idea to incorporate Open Access publishing early into a research project and budget with funds to cover any Open Access expenses.

In some cases, discrepancies between funder requirements and publisher policies may be handled by making an appendix to the original agreement or by only granting the publisher the rights to publish the article.

Funders have developed templates to help authors negotiate with publishers. One such template is an appendix to the publisher's own agreement, whereas a model agreement is an alternative to the publisher's agreement. Their function is to limit the copyright transfer to the publisher and ensure the author the right to deposit a version of the article in DTU Orbit or other non-commercial archives.

The publishers' own model agreements are often called Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTA). A CTA will typically be an agreement in which the writer transfers all rights to the publisher and thereby limits his or her rights to his or her own work.

DTU Library recommends that you either use an appendix or a model agreement to ensure your rights to your own work. The European Commission and the five Danish research funders have made templates for appendixes to agreements. 

Possible sanctions

As the funders' Open Access requirements mature, the consequences of not complying with them tighten. The European Commission can, as of Horizon2020, reduce the funding in the case of a receiver not meeting the demands in the contract

It is especially the large international funders that use sanctions where researchers do not meet the Open Access demands, e.g. funders like:

• National Institute of Health
• Welcome Trust
• Research Councils UK (RCUK)
• EU

Other sanctions include retaining funds and excluding researchers from applying for funding in the future.