From 'as soon as possible' to 'immediate' Open Access
NWO will tighten its granting conditions in the area of Open Access with effect from 1 December. In concrete terms this means that all publications emerging from a 'call for proposals’ published by NWO after this date must be immediately accessible to everybody from the moment of publication. This adjustment will also hold for research funded by FOM - for projects and programmes funded within calls published after 1 December 2015. For calls published before 1 December and for running projects the current conditions remain applicable, which state that publications have to be Open Access as soon as possible after publication.
For some time now, NWO has already asked researchers to make their publications accessible via Open Access. With the stricter granting conditions, publication in Open Access is now a formal requirement. Each year thousands of scientific publications from research funded by NWO are published and the Open Access conditions will now apply to these.
Encourage Gold, require immediate Green Open Access has two basic variants. 'Gold' and 'Green' Open Access. These are two different variants of the same principle: free access to scientific publications. In the case of 'Gold' Open Access researchers publish in a fully Open Access journal. These journals are completely accessible to the public and do not have any paid subscriptions. An alternative to publishing in a Gold Open Access journal is 'Green' Open Access. In this case the researcher publishes in a subscription journal but ensures that immediately after publication a version of the work is openly accessible via a public database (for example, a university repository). In addition to these two variants the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has made agreements with many academic publishers. These agreements make it possible for Dutch researchers to publish Open Access without extra costs. By making use of one of these possibilities researchers can continue to publish in the vast majority of academic journals and at the same time allow everybody to access the publications free of charge.
Incentive Fund
NWO supports the transition to Open Access financially. The possible costs or publishing Gold Open Access articles and books are therefore subsidisable via NWO's Incentive Fund Open Access Publications. Project leaders of research funded by NWO can apply for up to 6,000 euros per project to publish via the Gold Open Access route.
Further information
Contact
Maarten Muns, NWO Communications, +31 6 10 01 51 02.