FWF Open Access PolicyCurrent Activities and Challenges

Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

FWFOpenAccess - FWF Open Access on Twitter

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Open Access activities in a nutshell (I)

2001 Covering APCs up to three years after conclusion of the project with additional funds

2003 Signing the Berlin Declaration

2004 Launching OA Policy incl. Green and Gold, mandate since 2006

2008 – now strong engagement for a common European OA policy via Science Europe (see also C. Kratky NATURE 29/8/2013)

2010 Joining Europe PubMedCentral, now > 4000 papers are OA

2011 Starting one of the first OA book programme, incl. the FWF E-Book Library, ~ 260 books are now OA + ~ 60 p.a., Ø

231 downloads per year2

Open Access activities in a nutshell (II)

2012 OA testimonials from over 40 top researchers in Austria

2012 Foundation of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA), members from 45 organizations

2012 Initial funding programme for OA journals from the Humanities and Social Sciences, 8 journals are funded

2013 Financial support of: SCOAP³, OA Days, OAPEN, DOAJ, OA Monograph Conference London, arXiv, Wellcome Trust study on APCs

2013 OA Monitoring: 33% of FWF funded articles are Gold or Hybrid articles + ~ 30-35% Green

2013 Making publication costs for 2013 publically available

2014 One of the first pilots on offsetting Hybrid OA costs against subscriptions with IOP Publishing

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Current FWF OA Policy - Three Options …

Green Archiving the final “accepted manuscript” in any sustainable

subject or institutional repository with a maximum embargo of

12 months (Europe PMC in the Life Sciences)

Gold Direct publication in an Open Access medium by applying CC-

BY license, APCs are covered

Hybrid If offered by publishers and if explicitly chosen by FWF

funded authors, payment for Open Access for single articles in

subscription journals can also be covered (CC-BY)

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FWF Publication Costs 2013*

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Type NoØ Cost per

unitCosts

Classical Publications Costs for Journals 257 € 1.074 € 275.916

APCs for OA Journals 209 € 1.393 € 291.047

APCs for Hybrid Journals 922 € 2.278 € 2.100.675

OA Books (incl. copy editing, printing costs) 49 € 15.704 € 769.500

Total Cost € 3.437.138

Current Challenges

After collecting data of publication costs for 2013 and the report Developing an Effective Market for Open Access the FWF faces following challenges:

Negotiating together with the Austrian Library Consortium offsetting deals for Hybrid OA with publishers (see the IOP deal)

Enforcing the principles of “Openness”, see HowOpenIsIt

Introducing price caps for Gold and Hybrid APCs ?

Cease to pay for any additional publication costs for subscription journals (e.g. colour figures, page charges and submission fees) ?

Enforcing Green OA with uniform embargos

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Long-Term Challenges (I)

Green Open Access: setting clear and uniform rules for a common OA policy among funding and research institutions in Europe, e.g. embargo periods of max. 12 months

Levels of Openness: defining the principles of openness more strictly, see HowOpenIsIt

Publisher Services: defining the services publishers have to offer if publications fees for OA are covered by funders or research institutions (see 2.)

Price-Services-Sensitivity: including publication costs in the research budgets so that researchers become more sensible for the price-service-relation by publishers, see Solomon/Björk (2014)

Transition Models: negotiating transition models with publishers which avoid the problem of double dipping for publication costs, see IOP Publishing and Austria / UK, SCOAP³, Knowledge Unlachted

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Long-Term Challenges (II)

Funding the Transition: launching cross-border funding models which support the transition of toll access to full OA

Funding Academia-governed Publication Models: launching cross-border funding models which support new non-commercial, academia governed publication models with no or very low publication fees, see for example the proposals of OLH, K|N Consultants or OPuS

Funding OA Infrastructure: cross-border funding of international OA infrastructure and service provider like repositories (e.g. arXiv, Europe PubMedCentral, OAPEN) or databases (e.g. DOAJ, Romeo Sherpa)

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