Changes to the Open Access Publishing Requirements of the Academy of Finland

How have the open access publication requirements changed?

The Academy of Finland requires projects to make their peer-reviewed articles immediately and openly available to the public in accordance with the Plan S principles and the Finnish national Open Policy for Open Access to Scholarly Publications.  

Central changes:  

1. Peer-reviewed articles must be made immediately open access in accordance with Plan S principles. 
   • Embargoes (6-12 months) are allowed only in exceptional cases where the publisher does not allow immediate parallel publishing.  
2. Peer-reviewed articles must be published with a Creative Commons license that guarantees free and immediate access.
   • CC BY 4.0 license is recommended, but CC BY-SA 4.0, CC0 and CC BY-ND 4.0 are accepted. 
   • Open licenses are also required when parallel publishing an article (green open access). 
3. Open access publishing expenses can no longer be included in the Academy of Finland project costs. 
   • Article processing charges from publishing in Plan S compliant journals can be covered with basic funding. 

Notable:  

1. In order to comply with Plan S principles and to be published with a CC BY license, most publishers require articles to be published gold open access. 
   • In practice, this means paying the publisher an article processing charge (APC), and that parallel publishing articles via green open access cannot be utilised as much as before. 
2. Authors are encouraged to check the publishers’ options for Plan S compliant open access publishing before submitting a manuscript.  
   • You can check the Plan S compliance of a journal from the Journal Checker tool 
   • If you are unsure of a publisher’s open access practices and compliance with the Academy of Finland’s requirements, please get in touch with the Open Science and ACRIS team at [email protected] 
3. Aalto University offers an increasing amount of Plan S compliant Open Access publishing agreements (transformative agreements) that enable free open access publishing that meets the Academy of Finland’s Open Access requirements. 
   • The majority of the agreements cover hybrid journals, rather than fully open access journals. 
   • In order to use these transformative agreements, the corresponding author must be affiliated with Aalto University. 
4. The Academy of Finland also encourages open access publishing of conference articles and monographs, but currently the requirements do not apply to these publication types. The new Academy of Finland guidelines regarding open access of conference articles and monographs will be published later. 

Academy of Finland information on Open Access to Scientific Publications

Academy of Finland is part of the cOAlition S consortium, which launched Plan S open access initiative in the autumn of 2018. Plan S aims at maximizing the accessibility and impact of publicly funded research and accelerating the transition to full and immediate open access publishing.