Open Access: Horizon Europe Open Science Requirements

Researchers must demonstrate how they will adopt OS practices as relevant to their discipline, including mandatory open science practices - Open access to research outputs, including publications, data (where possible), software, code etc. as well as recommended open science practices.

Researchers must demonstrate how they will adopt OS practices as relevant to their discipline, including:

• Horizon Europe mandates full and immediate Open Access to peer-reviewed publications under an open licence (CC BY for journal articles; for monographs and other long form works this can be CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND). 
• A copy of the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript must be deposited in a trusted open access repository at the time of publication, even if the article has been published in a fully open access journal. 
• Researchers should give specific details of where and how they will deposit their research outputs under open licences. 
• Research Repository UCD provides a trusted repository for UCD publications. Other trusted repositories include ArXiv and Zenodo. UCD Library can provide advice on identifying a suitable trusted open access repository for your publications.
• You may also wish to give details of any open access publication venues you plan to submit to. UCD Library has a range of open access publishing agreements with publishers which you may also wish to refer to.

Responsible management of research data in line with the FAIR principles [Open access to research data and other research outputs should be addressed in the section on research data management of your proposal]

Information about the research outputs/tools/instruments needed to validate the conclusions of scientific publications or research data.

Digital or physical access to the results needed to validate the conclusions of scientific publications, unless exceptions apply.

Where relevant to the discipline and your proposal, consider including details of how you will adopt some or all of the following:

Early and open sharing of research

• You may wish to indicate how you will share your research on preprint servers such as Zenodo, ArXiv, MedRXiv, PsyArxiv, SocArxiv, BioRXiv etc., other engagement with pre-publication dissemination channels, preregistration of the research plan in a public repository (e.g. OSF, PROSPERO), or publication of registered reports prior to data collection where relevant to the discipline.

Use of open research infrastructure for knowledge sharing and research dissemination

Actions to increase the reproducibility of your research

Participation in open peer review 

• A number of journals and publishing platforms now require or offer open peer review as an option - give details if any of your planned publication venue(s) offer open peer review if you anticipate availing of this.

Open collaboration within and beyond the scientific community through public engagement, citizen science, and involvement of end-users

• Engagement activities may include co-design (workshops, focus groups etc. to inform the design and development of research agendas or roadmaps), co-creation (e.g. directly involving citizens or users in data collection, implementation or as co-researchers), or co-assessment (involvement in feedback or monitoring of the project).

Recipients of Horizon Europe grants must manage the digital research data collected throughout the project in line with the FAIR principles and must deposit in a trusted open access repository.  

The Definition of FAIR principles

• Findable
• Accessible
• Interoperable
• Reusable 

Horizon Europe mandates immediate and full open access to monographs, edited volumes and books.

Authors must attach a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial/Non-Derivatives license to their work. This means you retain the copyright to the author accepted manuscript (the last version, with full peer review, before publication). You are also specifying that others can use your work so long as they cite you as author. Non-commercial means it cannot be used for commercial purposes, and non-derivatives means others cannot adapt or create new versions of your work.

See our page on Creative Commons Licenses for more details.

The published version or author accepted manuscript must be deposited in a trusted open access repository, such as Research Repository UCD.

Open Access book fees may be eligible to cover the first open access edition of the book. Printing fees are not covered. Include the estimated costs in your proposal. Fees are not eligible where the book has a mix of open and closed content.

Talk to your publisher or editor from the beginning and flag that you are funded by Horizon Europe and are required to make your work fully open access. Horizon Europe guidelines advise authors not to sign contracts that will restrict their ability to share their work open access. 

Open Access Routes

• Green - Publish the book the traditional way (online or in print), and deposit the author accepted manuscript in a repository.
• Diamond - Publish the book fully open access, see Directory of Open Access Books for publishers, and deposit the author accepted manuscript in a repository.
• Gold - Pay to have your book published open access, and deposit the author accepted manuscript in a repository.

Visit our page on Open Access Book publishing for more details.

ERC Grants are bound by the open science policy of the associated funding framework (i.e. Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020 etc.).

The information on this page applies to ERC Grants funded by Horizon Europe. The ERC webpage below gives more details.

In order to comply with Open Access publishing requirements, Horizon Europe encourages researchers to notify publishers of their grant agreement obligations (including the licensing requirements) at the manuscript submission stage. 

They provide this suggested text.

“This work was funded by the Εuropean Union under the Horizon Europe grant [grant number]. As set out in the Grant Agreement, beneficiaries must ensure that at the latest at the time of publication, open access is provided via a trusted repository to the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication under the latest available version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public Licence (CC BY) or a licence with equivalent rights. CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND or equivalent licenses could be applied to long-text formats.”

Alternatively the templates below, created by Plan S, can be used.

Horizon Europe permits but does not fund publication in hybrid journals.

Hybrid journals have some content closed behind a paywall and some content fully open access. They charge authors fees for open access publication.

If an author wishes to publish in a hybrid journal and cannot cover the article processing charges for open access, they can choose to publish in the same journal, but behind a paywall. To meet the open access requirement they can then deposit the author accepted manuscript in an open access repository such as Research Repository UCD.

Full details of these requirements are set out under Article 17 of the EU Grants AGA - Annotated Model Grant Agreement on the top of this guide.