Open access funding and funder policies

What funders require

A growing number of research funders attach open access conditions to grants. The usual elements are that the published article is free to read without delay, that it carries an open licence (most often CC BY), that a copy is deposited in a public repository, and that the authors keep the rights they need to do so. Conditions differ between funders and between grant years, so read the policy that applies to your grant and keep a copy of the version in force when you were funded.

Two examples show how specific the rules can be.

• Wellcome. Its policy says research articles must be openly available on publication under a CC BY licence (CC BY-ND by exception), with a CC BY version in Europe PMC. Wellcome's page states that from 1 January 2025 it funds article processing charges only for research articles in fully open access journals or platforms indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• Gates Foundation. Its public policy page states that research it funds, including underlying data sets, should be openly accessible and reusable and promptly disseminated. The page I read does not give licence or timing details; they are on the foundation's separate open access policy site.

If your funder does not appear here, find its open access policy on its own website. Do not assume that a journal's open access model automatically satisfies it.

Plan S and cOAlition S

cOAlition S is a group of national research funders that launched on 4 September 2018 with support from the European Commission and the European Research Council. Its framework, Plan S, asks that publications from research funded by its members be open access, either in open access journals or platforms or deposited in open repositories without embargo. According to the principles page:

• authors or their institutions keep copyright;
• CC BY 4.0 is the default licence, with CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC0 accepted as alternatives, and CC BY-ND only with a justified request;
• publication fees, where they apply, are covered by funders or institutions rather than individual researchers, and should be transparent;
• hybrid journals are not supported except within transformative arrangements, and funding for transformative journals was set to end on 31 December 2024;
• open access journals should be registered in DOAJ and repositories in OpenDOAR.

The Rights Retention Strategy, which lets authors keep the right to deposit the accepted manuscript, is described on a separate page of the cOAlition S site; read it if you hold a Plan S grant. Plan S applies to authors whose funder is a member, not to every author.

Research4Life access

Research4Life is the shared name of four programmes (Hinari, AGORA, OARE and ARDI) that give eligible institutions in low- and middle-income countries free or low-cost online access to peer-reviewed content. It is a partnership of UN agencies, universities and publishers. Eligible institutions include universities, research institutes, hospitals and national libraries. Eligibility depends on a country list on the Research4Life site; I could not confirm there whether a given country qualifies, so check the eligible-countries page or ask your library before relying on it. Research4Life concerns access to read content.

Publication charges at this journal (from the charges page)

This section is completed from the journal's charges page, which is the source for any fee. At the time of writing, the journal's public submission pages state that there is no article processing charge and no submission or review fee, that articles are published open access under CC BY 4.0, and that each article receives a Crossref DOI. The editor should confirm these statements against the charges page before publishing, and the page governs if it differs.

A journal with no author charge is easy to fit to most funder policies on licence and cost. You still need to check any further requirement of your funder, such as repository deposit or data sharing.

Always check the official page

Policies are revised. Before submitting, open your funder's current open access policy and the journal's own policy, and, if in doubt, ask the funder or your institution's library. Quotations and summaries here are a starting point, not a legal reading of any policy.

Sources

• cOAlition S, about: https://www.coalition-s.org/about/
• cOAlition S, principles and implementation: https://www.coalition-s.org/principles-and-implementation/
• Wellcome open access policy: https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/guidance/open-access-guidance/open-access-policy
• Gates Foundation open access policy: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/policies-and-resources/open-access-policy
• Research4Life: https://www.research4life.org/about/