European-Union open access and data policies
The European Union (EU) has open access requirements for research findings arising from funded grants. Authors publishing research acknowledging EU grants should follow the Plan S guidance on publishing open access to remain compliant with funder policy.
Funders require scholarly outputs to be made openly accessible and discoverable, and will assess researchers' outputs compliance when considering future funding requests.
Some funders have internal mechanisms for funding Gold open access or may provide block grants. Authors should also check their specific funder conditions of award and open access policy for individual requirements.
Some of these are detailed below. Some funders may require authors to make use of specific repositories or archives for research and underpinning research data. The European Commission provides a rigorous peer-reviewed platform Open Research Europe, for scholarly publishing of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funded research.
Outlined in Brunel's Research Integrity Code, the University expects all research articles, and where possible data, to be made open access.
Researchers funded by Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7) projects must ensure open access to peer reviewed research articles resulting from funding in certain areas.
Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe grant holders must ensure open access to all peer-reviewed publications resulting from funded research.
For FP7 projects the policy applies to these research areas: Energy, Environment, Health, Information and Communication Technologies (Challenge 2: Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics), Research Infrastructures (e-Infrastructures), Science in Society, Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities.
Researchers can comply with EU policy through Green or Gold open access. Authors should use the Plan S Journal Checker Tool on the Plan S and publishing your research web page to check whether a journal offers a compliant publication route for the appropriate funder/s and which route you should opt for.
Gold open access compliance
Horizon
Gold open access charges are eligible costs to Horizon 2020 grants. You will need to indicate expected costs in your grant proposal - contact Brunel's Open Access team for help estimating them. There is a pilot to pay open access charges after grants have closed.
Before submission, check that your publisher's embargo on open access in a repository is no longer than 6 months (12 for Social Sciences and Humanities), or that there is a Gold open access option.
More details can be found on the European Commission website.
If you are Horizon funded and are requesting payment for Gold OA by Brunel's institutional fund, you should first investigate this funding option. This is in order maintain a sustainable transition to open access publishing for the institution. If there is a reason you cannot access Horizon funding, and you still wish (or must) comply through Gold OA, please provide full details along with your request in BRAD.
Green open access compliance
FP7 / Horizon
Researchers publishing in traditional subscription journals can comply through Green open access, by making their papers available via BURA within 6 months of publication (Energy, Environment, Health, Information and Communication Technologies, Research Infrastructures), or 12 months of publication (Science in Society, Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities)
Provided your publisher's embargo is no longer than 6 months (12 for Social Sciences and Humanities), you can comply by depositing your final accepted manuscript in an open access repository. It is best practice to deposit in BURA on acceptance. To comply with the Horizon 2020 policy, the latest time for deposit is the date of publication. This will also make you compliant with the REF open access policy.
How does this relate to REF?
Research England allows compliance through either the Gold or the Green route to open access. By publishing your paper in line with the funder requirements and by depositing your manuscript into BURA you will be compliant with REF requirements.
The EU is developing the European Data Science Cloud to support the publication, discoverability and reuse of research data arising from EU funded research in line with the EU's Open Science Policy.
EU funded research should contain a Data Access Statement with details of how the underpinning research data can be accessed. A statement should be included on the publication even where there are no data associated with the article, or the data are inaccessible.
The statement should contain a Digital Object identifier (DOI) link to the supporting materials or metadata description held in the University's research data repository and registry, Brunelfigshare. If the materials are unavailable in digital format or are closed, the metadata should describe the terms and conditions of access in detail. Data can include code, software, textual records, manuscripts, images, sounds, objects and numerical scores. Researchers can reserve a DOI for the data in advance of submission for publication.
Please contact researchdata@brunel.ac.uk with any queries and see the related links for more information about publishing research data.