Publishing in open access journals is already a common requirement for many grant schemes. However, it's important to carefully choose the journal and ensure that the publication's licensing arrangements meet the funder's requirements. The following models are available for publishing in Open Access:
Gold route
Publishing in open access journals (OA provided by publishers).
👉Useful tools:
DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
Sherpa Romeo - a tool used for an indicative overview of publishers' publication policies
👉 Beware of so-called hybrid journals - journals that publish only some articles in OA mode, the rest is only available to subscribers. Publishing in these journals may not always be recognized by the funding agency as fulfilling the OA publishing requirement!
Green route
Autoarchiving in open repositories (subject, institutional, national, catch-all). We select a trusted repository mainly according to the domain specifics, the services and tools offered (persistent identifiers, open access, licensing, versioning,...) trustworthiness (certified repositories), or according to the requirements of the funding agency.
👉 Tip: A trusted repository is e.g. the Masaryk University Repository. Among the most used catch-all repositories is Zenodo.
👉 Useful tools: ROAR, OpenDOAR, re3data - Open Access repository directories
Hybrid route
The journal is available on a subscription basis, only selected articles are published in the Open AccessPro mode if the author pays the Open Publication Fee, however, this is a double payment - for this reason some providers do not tolerate this route as meeting OA project conditions (e.g. Horizon Europe).
An alternative option is to publish on the Open Research Europe (ORE) platform, which was set up by the European Commission mainly for the purpose of publishing Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe results. The platform allows immediate open access to publications (usually under a CC-BY licence).
💰 Article processing charges: When publishing in OA journals, the author usually pays a publication fee, the so-called Article Processing Charge (APC). The APC is an allowable project cost for most grant agencies.
🔓 Licensing: When publishing in Open Access, the publication needs to be accompanied by an appropriate type of public license. In the case of publications, these are mostly Creative Commons licenses. When selecting a license, take into account the provider's rules, a result with a license other than the required one (usually CC-BY) may not be recognized!
🆔 Persisent identifiers: Persistent and permanent availability of information about publications, data and people is ensured by persistent identifiers (PIDs). The use of PIDs is a good practice of open publishing. In some projects, it is already a requirement to include, for example, a person's PID.
DOI, Handle - used to uniquely identify digital objects.
ORCID, Researcher ID - used to uniquely identify persons. Further information including instructions can be found here.
RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) - identifier for research activities.
👨👦👦 Citizen Science and other principles: Citizen Science is a recommended principle of Open Science, beyond mandatory procedures. Where possible and appropriate, it should be incorporated into projects. It involves the general public and other stakeholders outside R&D in research. The public can participate in any part of the research process, from data collection and analysis to problem-solving and presenting results.
👉 Tip: ECSA 10 Principles of Citizen Science
Other recommended principles of Open Science: Open Peer Review, Open Source, Open Laboratory Notebooks, Open Education Resources, etc.