Open Access: Policy

Plan S was developed by cOAlition S, a collaborative venture of international grant-awarding organisations, with the aim of achieving 100% Open Access. ZonMw has applied the implementation guidelines in its Open Access policy.

The key requirements of Plan S are:

• Free access to the publication
• Direct Open Access: no embargo period between publication date in a journal and fee access online
• Publication under an open Creative Commons licence
• Retention of copyrights

ZonMw allows Open Access publication via several routes:

• Golden route: The direct Open Access publication of the article in an Open Access journal or platform registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals. This route can involve costs, the so-called ‘Article Publication Charges’ (APCs).
• Green route: The direct deposit without embargo of a copy of the ‘Version of Record’ or the ‘Author Accepted Manuscript’ in an Open Access repository registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories. For all grant rounds published since 1 April 2021, ZonMw requires that project managers at least deposit all articles in the Europe PMC repository. For grant rounds published previously, ZonMw encourages the use of Europe PMC as Open Access repository, but this is not a requirement.
• Hybrid route with ‘transformative agreement’: Publication in a hybrid journal that is part of a transformative agreement entered into between Universities of The Netherlands (VSNU) and/or UKB (a partnership of Dutch University Libraries and The Royal Library of the Netherlands) and a publisher. A series of similar agreements have been/will be signed with major publishers according to which in certain cases Dutch researchers can achieve Open Access publication free of charge or at reduced rates (check whether this applies for your organisation). To determine whether a specific journal is part of a transformative agreement, use can be made of the Open Access journal browser.

Creative Commons (CC) offers authors, artists, scientists, teachers and all other creative makers the freedom to deal with copyright in a flexible manner. With a choice of different standard licences, the copyright holder determines the extent to which his or her work may be further disseminated and subject to which conditions.

Since 1 January 2021, ZonMw has made the CC BY licence compulsory. This licence means that you are free to share (to copy, to distribute and to pass on via any medium or file format) and process (to remix, to amend and to create derived works for all purposes, including commercial purposes) the work on condition of acknowledgement of the original author.

Read more about the Creative Commons licence rules here.

Europe PMC is one of the largest Open Access scientific platforms and is the European version of the globally used American PubMed Central (PMC). For example, it contains 6.6 million full articles and 38.1 million abstracts, including those from PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC). While PubMed offers access to abstracts and PMC to full articles, Europe PMC online grants access to a worldwide collection of abstracts, full articles, preprints and patents in medical and life sciences. This makes it one of the richest search engines in the field of life sciences and medical sciences.

On 1 April 2021, together with the Dutch Research Council (NWO), ZonMw became a member of Europe PMC. This membership means that researchers involved in research financed by ZonMw can share their publications with a worldwide audience, from a single central location. The publications are automatically enriched or linked to information from other sources such as preprints and grant and project information, or for example links to underlying research data. For all grant rounds published since 1 April 2021, ZonMw requires project managers to at least deposit a copy (Version of Record or the Author Accepted Manuscript) of articles resulting from their ZonMw project in EPMC.

The ZonMw Open Access policy assumes full sharing of knowledge and data from all ZonMw projects, in which temporary confidentiality is only possible in the event of substantial interests (privacy, patent application). In that case, contact the ZonMw programme team according to which your project has been financed.

The obligation for Open Access publication is an integral part of the ZonMw grant conditions. ZonMw monitors compliance with the Open Access policy in its primary process of grant awarding procedures.

Open Access publication can involve costs, for example if Article Processing Charges (APCs) have to be paid. This is a payment made to a publisher for making an article Open Access. For certain projects, since 1 January 2021, ZonMw has offered financial support for the costs of the APCs, if publication takes place according to the full golden route. These costs must be included in the budget for the application. For details, check the call text for your application.

Conditions for financial support:

• The instructions for claiming Open Access costs must be followed, as described in the Instructions for Open Access publication.
• Financial support for Open Access publication costs is only available in so far as permitted on the basis of European and other legislation and regulations. This is for example not possible for projects in a grant round organised under the General Block Exemption Regulation.
• Costs for publication covered by existing transformative agreements or that can be covered by other possibilities within your own institution (such as institutional Open Access budgets) are not payable by ZonMw. Project managers / researchers can make use of the Open Access journal browser for an insight into journals for which a transformative agreement has been entered into. More news about negotiations appears on the website openaccess.nl, maintained by VSNU, NWO, SURF and UKB. Open Access publication via other routes is also permitted, but ZonMw provides no financial resources for these routes.

It is a misconception that all Open Access journals charge APCs for publication. According to the information provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals, the majority of journals charge no fee (source: www.openaccess.nl). If you opt to publish via the green route (own archiving), no costs will be charged. In that connection, we are pleased to refer you to the initiative ‘You share, we take care’.

In addition, thanks to the so-called ‘big deals’ or ‘transformative agreements’, Open Access publication (alongside publication in the subscription model) is possible at a reduced rate, or even free of charge. If you want to know for which journals a transformative agreement has been entered into, please refer to the website of openaccess.nl. This website includes an Open Access journal browser and a list of all publishers deals.