Open Access: OA Requirements in Horizon 2020

Information sheet from UCD Library and UCD Research:

The EC encourages authors to retain their copyright and grant adequate licences to publishers e.g.

- not signing a copyright transfer agreement (CTA) but providing a licence to publish
- signing and providing an addendum to ensure you can fulfill the EC requirements

Horizon 2020 (Article 29) mandates open access to all scientific publications and, from January 2017, to all research data, with the possibility to opt out from this “Open Research Data” pilot.

Publications

• An electronic copy of the publication must be deposited in a suitable green open access repository. The version of the paper will generally be the author's "post-print" or author's final version of the article after the refereeing process has taken place. 
• The green open access repository can be a disciplinary repository (e.g. PubMed Central or arXiv) or an institutional repository such as Research Repository UCD. A centralised repository such as Zenodo can also be used.
• If a gold open access route is chosen, a copy must also be self-archived in a repository to ensure long-term preservation of the article.
• Venues such as Research Gate or Academia.edu, publisher websites, personal, or project-specific webpages or Dropbox etc. are not valid repositories.
• Open access should be provided as soon as possible and in any case no later than six months after the official publication date (or 12 months in the Social Sciences and Humanities).

Data

The Commission's approach is ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’ and the open access requirement only applies to research data related to scientific publications. They define research data to include statistics, results of experiments, measurements, observations resulting from fieldwork, survey results, interview recordings and images.

Data management costs are fully eligible for funding under Article 6 and Article 6.2.D.3 of the H2020 Grant Agreement or under other Articles relevant for the cost category chosen. Beneficiaries of ERC grants can opt out of sharing research data without having to give a reason.

A number of useful other resources are also available:

Once you have decided which open access route/s to take (Gold and Green; or Green only which will link to a traditional published version of your article), ensure that you include the following bibliographic metadata to ensure visibility, traceability and monitoring:

• the terms ‘European Union (EU)’ and ‘Horizon 2020’ or ‘Euratom’ and 'Euratom Research and Training Programme 2014-18’ (depending on the grant); for example:
  • "The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme under grant agreement n° xxxxxx.” 
  • “Part of this project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No xxxxxx”
     
• the name of the action, acronym and grant number
   
• the publication date, and length of embargo period if applicable and
   
• a ‘persistent identifier’ (e.g. a stable digital object identifier (DOI) which identifies the publication and links to an authoritative version)
   

The Library will include the above details on the record on Research Repository UCD and will add the publication date and length of embargo period if applicable.