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:
- 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.
- 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).
- 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:
- 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.
- 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]
- 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.
- 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.
Academy of Finland's open science requirements
Open science and research are strategic objectives of the Academy of Finland, and a criterion in their funding decisions. Their goal is to make research outputs and their metadata quickly and widely available for reuse. The Academy of Finland participates in the open access initiative Plan S, which affects the open access and open data requirements in calls starting in 2021.

Plan S
Plan S is an open access initiative launched by the EU Commission and Science Europe. At its core is the objective that, in calls starting from 1 January 2021, all scholarly articles resulting from public research funding must be published in open access journals or on open access platforms.

Funders' open science requirements
Research funders want to promote open science and research, which is why they set requirements for the openness of research publications and data they are funding. European Commission (EC) and Academy of Finland are participating in the open access initiative Plan S, which affects the open access and open data requirements in calls starting in 2021.

Horizon Europe open science requirements
Horizon Europe further expands open access towards open science, and comprises of both mandatory and recommended open science practices. European Commission (EC) participates in the open access initiative Plan S, which affects the open access and open data requirements in calls starting in 2021.

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