The EC supports the transition to Open Science in its R&I framework programmes with a new platform for their beneficiaries to publish articles in Open Access.
In its push for transitioning towards Open Science, the European Commission (EC) took an additional step to support researchers in Open Access (OA) publishing. On 20 March, the EC announced that it has awarded a contract for setting up an own OA publishing platform dedicated to the beneficiaries of its current research and innovation framework programme Horizon 2020 (H2020).
The contract for tender to run the platform was won by F1000 Research Ltd., a publishing company deeply engaged in OA already, which provides not only publishing, but also related services to researchers, institutions and funders, such as support for collaboration. The platform will allow researchers of all scientific disciplines to publish their original articles resulting from H2020 projects free of charge. A first pilot of the platform will become available already as early as fall 2020 for the submission of articles. The full launch of the platform will take place in early 2021.
The EC will guarantee for the quality of publications on the platform with an open and transparent peer-review process. In addition, a Scientific Advisory Board will steer the publishing and ensure its standards from submission to review, post-publication curation and preservation.
The platform will also become available to the future grantees of Horizon Europe, who will likely have to follow even more strict OA guidelines in line with the criteria in Plan S, an initiative launched in September 2018 by a consortium of international research funders. Horizon Europe rules will demand mandatory and immediate OA to all publications with most probably no embargo period anymore, while H2020 tolerated an embargo of up to 12 months. The EC will continue to fund OA-related article processing charges, but only for full OA journals and no longer for ‘hybrid’ models with an OA and a subscription-based part. Grantees will still have the choice though to publish their articles via the Green OA route in repositories.