The following Open-Access Policy applies to peer-reviewed publications (e.g., journal articles) resulting from FWF projects approved after December 31, 2020.
Pursuant to the Berlin Declaration and Plan S of the cOAlition S, the FWF requires all funding recipients, principal investigators, and project participants to make their peer-reviewed publications openly accessible on the internet if they result in full or in part from FWF-funded projects.
Open access to publications can be ensured by direct publication in an open access publication medium (e.g., open access journal, open access publication platform). The “Creative Commons Attribution CC BY” license (or an equivalent free license) must be used in any case for the publication (the “CC BY-ND” license is also permitted in exceptional cases if approved by the FWF). Journals and publication platforms must be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and meet the technical requirements under Plan S.
Authors may publish individual articles in subscription journals as open access. This is possible if there is a transformative open access agreement in place between the publisher and the FWF and/or an Austrian research institution (see List of agreements) or the journal has a transformative open access journal according to the cOAlition S criteria. The “Creative Commons Attribution CC BY” license (or an equivalent free license) must be used in any case for publications. Information on the mandatory open access policy for peer-reviewed scientific contributions in collective volumes or book chapters can be found in the FAQs of the program Open-Access Block Grant program.
The third option for open access is self-archiving the manuscript accepted by the publisher (accepted manuscript) in a registered repository listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and fulfilling the technical requirements under Plan S. Self-archiving must take place at the time of publication (with no embargo period) and the “Creative Commons Attribution CC BY” license (or an equivalent free license) must be used in any case.
Authors must implement the following steps in order to ensure compliance with the FWF’s open access policy:
The “cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool” should be used to check whether a publication medium is compliant with the FWF’s Open-Access Policy and to see which of the above options can be used.
The following text must be included in all publications upon submission:
“This research was funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [grant DOI]. For open access purposes, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.”
Equivalent text to be included for publications in German: „Diese Forschung wurde gänzlich oder teilweise durch den Wissenschaftsfonds FWF finanziert [Grant-DOI]. Zum Zweck des freien Zugangs hat der:die Autor:in für jedwede akzeptierte Manuskriptversion, die sich aus dieser Einreichung ergibt, eine „Creative Commons Attribution CC BY“-Lizenz vergeben.“
See Plan S Rights Retention Strategy for further information.
Irrespective of the open access option selected (see I. Open Access Options), the publication must be stored in a repository by the publisher or the author(s) for long-term archiving from the time of publication. Either institutional or discipline-specific repositories can be selected for this purpose (see Directory of Open Access Repositories OpenDOAR).
For publications in the field of life sciences (or related topics), authors are required to publish their peer-reviewed publications in the Europe PMC repository. Projects affected by this will be notified separately by Europe PMC by email.
Costs for the open-access publishing of work (peer-reviewed journal articles, contributions to edited volumes, etc.) resulting in whole or in part from FWF-funded projects are supported by means of an Open-Access Block Grant provided in addition to the approved project budget.
Applications for funding of the costs of other peer-reviewed publication formats such as monographs, entire proceedings or collective volumes, scientific databases, and other web-based formats can be made through the Book Publications and Digital Publications programs.
The Open access activities and compliance with the Open-Access Policy must be documented in the Final Project Report to the FWF by providing a persistent identifier to the full text of the publication, where it can be viewed, read, and downloaded. Further information can be found under Research documentation.
Please note: The following Open-Access Policy applies to peer-reviewed publications (e.g., journal articles) from FWF projects approved before January 1, 2021.