A new monitoring study shows that Open Access publishing has steadily increased under H2020 and now reached 83%, making the EU a leader in Open Access.
On 6 September, the European Commission (EC) presented the results of a study monitoring Open Access (OA) publication under the last Research and Innovation (R&I) Framework Programme Horizon 2020 (H2020). The consortium, which conducted the study, formed by the analysis company PPMI (Lithuania), the Research and Innovation Centre Athena (Greece) and Maastricht University (the Netherlands), confirmed the positive momentum for Open Science (OS) in the EU with an average rate of 83% OA publications under H2020. More than half of them were published in OA journals, while the rest was deposited in OA repositories.
Not surprisingly, the highest rates of OA were achieved in the areas of curiosity-driven research and innovation, in the Excellent Science pillar of H2020, with an average of 86%. The leaders here were the European Research Council (ERC) and the Future Emerging Technologies (FET) programme with OA rates of 88%. With 81.9% compliance over all, researchers also adhered well to the policy of depositing publications in OA accessible repositories, the figure also included articles published in OA journals before depositing. Almost half of all H2020 linked articles (49%) were published under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which permit the reuse of the publication. The study estimated that the average Article Processing Costs (APC) for publishing in OA venues under H2020 amounted to approximately €2’200. In hybrid journals, APC were slightly higher with €2’600. Costs for APC connected to the OA publishing requirement, were covered by the EC as eligible costs in the respective grants. According to the study, this fact was not known to all researchers, who partially also paid APC from their own pockets.
The study also looked at access to publications and research data under FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) conditions. Institutional repositories mostly comply well with FAIR requirements, and 95% of the deposited articles include metadata with some type of persistent identifier (PID). The situation is not yet as good for research data, only 39% of data sets were findable, meaning the metadata included a PID or an URL connecting to the data file. Accessibility was even lower, only 32% of the data sets could effectively be fetched using the indicated URL.
The study provides the EC with advice on a process and reliable metrics to continue measuring OA requirements under Horizon Europe. The new R&I Framework Programme presents stricter OS requirements. OS practices will be evaluated in proposals under the excellence criterion. Publications in hybrid journals (i.e. journals that offer OA publication as well as subscription-based models) will no longer be supported under Horizon Europe, and APC under such agreements will no longer be eligible costs. Articles must be made available under OA at the date of publication (in an OA journal or repository) with no embargo (embargo permitted under H2020) and under a CC license. It will also become mandatory to deposit data in a trusted repository and grant OA adhering to FAIR conditions. Under H2020, the EC had only been conducting an Open Research Data Pilot.
In conclusion, the EC’s leadership in OA has paid off, and has put Europe in a globally leading position in OA. However, a close monitoring is necessary and cannot be replaced by self-reporting. According to the study, the EC will need to collaborate closely with other funding agencies across Europe and beyond, in order to agree on common standards and elements of the underlying infrastructure. The authors specifically mentioned the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which shall encompass the components needed to foster a linked ecosystem, in which information can be exchanged, and which facilitates the process for researchers to deposit data and for funders to retrieve and monitor it.