In 2015, the EU FP7 announced a post-grant pilot project to ensure all FP7 funded projects are published in open access, even after the funding program ended. The objective of this pilot project is to encourage researchers to publish their work on open access platforms. To ensure this, the EU makes post-FP7 published articles eligible for article processing charges (APCs) reimbursement. Nonetheless, this fund is primarily aimed for research grants that did not cover research publishing funds on gold open access journals.

The post-grant pilot project allows researchers and institutions to seek APCs refunding. According to this pilot project, articles and monographs are eligible for a maximum of 2,000 and 6,000 euros, respectively.

Reimbursements

The program runs until the end of April 2017. A report shows that the project has already attracted a lot of applications for reimbursement. Not all application can get approval, however. According to OpenAire, so far nearly 800 submitted requests (covering more than 500 projects) have been fully or conditionally approved for reimbursement. In total, the FP7 pilot project report shows, 950,933 EUR has been distributed. This makes the average paid 1,623 euro per publication. About 6% of the request approved came from books and monographs. The rest went to published articles.

About 58% (462) of the approved reimbursement went to five countries: Spain (168), UK (160), Italy (113), Germany (106) and the Netherlands (73). The top five journals where those articles and monographs were printed are Scientific Reports (89 publications), PLoS ONE (68), Nature Communications (40), Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (23) and Sensors (22).

Most FP7 grants did not earmark APC funds. However, following the EU’s 2012 open access policy, the APCs became an integral part of the Horizon 2020 research grants.

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