Policy

Deposit a machine-readable electronic copy of the published or accepted version in Spiral or a suitable subject-based, or centralised, repository with zero embargo and a CC BY license.

Horizon Europe programme guide (for open access see pages 50-53) (pdf)

ERC open access policy

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Routes to meeting open access requirements

Option 1 GOLD Publish in a fully open access journal, book, or publishing platform (for example Open Research Europe). Deposit the published version of the publication in a trusted repository before or at publication. 

OR 

Option 2 GREEN Publish in a subscription or hybrid journal, in a book for which some parts are not open access, or on a publishing platform that does not provide all of its scholarly content in open access. Self-archive the publication (usually the accepted manuscript) in a trusted repository before or at publication time. For journal articles and conference proceedings, rights retention under Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access policy, or negotiating with the publisher, ensures you retain the right to do this, see 'Rights retention statement' below. 

Alternatively you may publish GOLD open access in these venues where they are eligible for a transformative agreement Imperial has signed up to, see publisher agreements and discounts. 

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Scope of policy 

Funding Horizon Europe beneficiaries. 

Article types Peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to the results of your Horizon Europe funded project. For publications that do not primarily report on original results from the Horizon Europe funded research (such as review papers or books consisting of a compilation of articles that have already been published elsewhere), the policy does not apply. However, Horizon Europe encourages you to provide open access also to such publications. 

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Paying for GOLD open access 

Payment should be made from your active research award, but fees for publications in hybrid or subscription journals are not eligible. This includes so-called ‘transformative journals’, for which no exception applies. 

Publisher agreements Imperial has signed up to may allow you to publish GOLD open access in hybrid journals without making a payment. To have your paper included, follow the instructions for the relevant agreement. The corresponding author needs to have an Imperial College London affiliation, and other conditions may apply. 

Once a Horizon Europe award is closed, publications in fully open access journals listed in DOAJ may be eligible to have open access fees paid from the Imperial Open Access Fund. Apply for funding via Symplectic. 

No cost is associated with open access via the self-archiving or GREEN route. 

In fully open access publications, page charges or colour charges are eligible costs if incurred during the lifetime of your project and in line with the provisions of your grant agreement. This also applies to books to the extent that they cover the first digital open access edition of the book. Printing fees for monographs and other books are NOT eligible. Page or colour charges in hybrid or subscription publications are NOT eligible. 

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Rights retention statement 

Beneficiaries are required to retain sufficient intellectual property rights to comply with their open access obligations. For peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, under Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access Policy authors retain the right to comply by depositing the accepted manuscript in Spiral with no embargo and a CC BY license. This right is retained automatically for publication in journals where the publisher has been notified of our policy. A list of notified publishers is available.

If your publisher is on the list of those notified, simply deposit the accepted version of the manuscript in Spiral via Symplectic on acceptance. The open access team will make it available on publication with a CC BY license. 

If your publisher has not been notified, contact openaccess@imperial.ac.uk so that we can notify them. You will also need to notify your publisher of the funder requirements at submission, and to negotiate the terms of any publisher agreement that does not allow compliance. One way of notifying the publisher is by adding the following statement to the submitted manuscript:

‘This work was funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe grant [grant number]. As set out in the Grant Agreement, beneficiaries must ensure that at the latest at the time of publication, open access is provided via a trusted repository to the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication under the latest available version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public License (CC BY) or a license with equivalent rights. CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND or equivalent licenses could be applied to long-text formats’.

For publishers that have not been notified, if the publishing agreement is contrary to the grant agreement obligations, authors should negotiate its terms, or look for a different publishing venue or options, see page 50 of the Horizon Europe programme guide. 

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Required licence

 CC BY (latest available version) or a licence with equivalent rights required on all compliance routes.

For long-text publications such as monographs and edited volumes (but not book chapters), the licence may exclude commercial uses and/or derivative works (such as CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND).

For information see Creative Commons licenses or The anatomy of a Creative Commons License (SWAY).

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Other requirements

Beneficiaries of Horizon Europe have to ensure open access to research data generated in their projects under the principle ‘as open as possible and as closed as necessary’. This means that data is, in principle, open, unless beneficiaries decide to restrict access to some or all their research data for legitimate reasons. For information on requirements for Research data management, see page 45 of the Horizon Europe programme guide (pdf).