Open Access - Frequently Asked Questions

YES, IT DOES. Pursuant to Order No 38/2020 of the NCN Director of 27 May 2020, the Open Access Policy at the NCN was established with regard to publications resulting from the research projects, scholarships and fellowships as well as research activities funded or co-funded by the National Science Centre (hereinafter: the “Open Access Policy”).

The Open Access Policy applies to research projects, scholarships and fellowships as well as research activities recommended for funding from calls launched on 16 June 2020 onwards, whose funding agreements have been signed after 1 January 2021.

The Open Access Policy does not include the rules for publishing monographs, monograph chapters and peer-reviewed collected papers.

YES, THEY ALL DO. Pursuant to the funding agreement, project research results must be published in a journal/journals of international impact, following a peer-review evaluation.

All publications (including Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) or Versions of Record (VoR)), except for monographs, monograph chapters and peer-reviewed collected papers, resulting from a research project must be made available in open access with a CC-BY Creative Commons licence, alternatively for Transformative Agreement-based journals CC BY-SA Creative Commons licence or equivalent licence and must have a unique persistent identifier (e.g. DOI (preferably), URN or Handle).

Open access applies to scientific publications and publicly-funded research results being made available on the Internet in a digital form.

Furthermore, the data underlying the scientific publications resulting from a research project should be documented in a reliable manner to comply with the FAIR Data principles. They should be made available in a repository, where possible, under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain licence (CC0 licence).

Scientific articles are governed by the Open Access Policy at the NCN. The cost of open access publication must be planned and paid as indirect costs, i.e. under the special heading of indirect costs of open access equivalent to 2% of direct costs. The cost of open access publication can also be paid as general indirect costs.

NO, YOU CANNOT. The heading of indirect costs of open access (2% of direct costs) is an additional category of costs designated for open access only. The costs of open access costs can also be paid as general indirect costs (up to 20% of direct costs).

NO, THEY CANNOT. Funds for open access publication may only be planned under the heading of access category (with additional funding under the heading of general indirect costs, if needed).

NO, IT IS NOT. Indirect costs of open access of up to 2% of direct costs must be planned under a separate heading. The costs of making publications and research data available in open access (up to 2% of direct costs) may be planned within the indirect costs. They may be planned under the heading of open access (applicants must enter the cost of open access forecasted for the entire duration of the research project). The percentage of forecasted costs must be entered under the heading of breakdown of project costs. Other indirect costs of up to 20% of direct costs may also be planned in the proposal.

NO, IT CANNOT. The funds allocated for open access cannot exceed 2% of direct costs. Additionally, open access costs can be paid as general indirect costs (up to 20% of direct costs).

NO, THEY ARE NOT. If the applicant is a group of entities, separate budgets must be created in the proposal in the ZSUN/OSF submission system, for the leader and each partner. Then, based on the budgets, the costs of open access costs must be calculated for each institution independently. Please remember that they cannot exceed 2% of total direct costs.

Research results may be published in hybrid journals free of charge. Article Processing Charges in hybrid journals are not accounted for as eligible costs. The NCN recognises articles published in hybrid journals as compliant with the agreement in so far as they meet all of the following conditions:

• the Version of Record (VoR2 ) or the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM3) is published, by the author or publisher, in an open repository immediately upon the article’s online publication (without any embargo period);
• the repository referred to above is registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (openDOAR);
• VoR or AAM must have a unique persistent identifier (e.g. DOI, URN, UUID, Handle or other). If the version deposited in the repository and the published version are different (AAM and VoR), they should be tagged with different PIDs; and
• articles must be published pursuant to the CC-BY licence

YES, YOU SHOULD. The project funds may only be spent on Article Processing Charges of the first and third publication routes laid down in the Open Access Policy.

Additional charges imposed by the publishers are not accounted for as eligible costs. Article Processing Charges should include all charges imposed on the scientists by the publisher on account of open access publication.

Funds allocated for Article Processing Charges should be spent prudently and be well-documented. Where possible, one should use waivers and discounts on the Article Processing Charges offered by some magazines or open access journals.

YES, THEY CAN, provided that they are incurred before the article is sent to the publisher. The costs allocated for outsourcing may be planned and used for drafting the article and submitting it to the publisher. All publication charges must be paid from direct costs.

Please remember that the fees for pre-publishing reviews are not accounted for as eligible costs, even if they are required by the publisher.

The ZSUN/OSF submission system does not allow the direct costs to be detailed, therefore you must only provide the required amount. The costs are settled as a lump sum. The costs of open access publication can only be incurred from the funds under the heading of open access. Additionally they can be paid as general indirect costs (up to 20% of direct costs).

YES, THEY CAN. The participating entity may cover a part of the open access publication costs from the general indirect costs or its own resources.

If papers resulting from a research project are published in open access journals and the costs of such publication are covered from other sources, there is no need to plan the open access costs in the proposal.

NO. Charges for extra services ordered by the author (prints, colour printed drawings, etc.) are settled separately from the Article Processing Charges and are not eligible for the NCN.

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You can check it using the Journal Checker Tool.

There is no need to do so.

YES, THEY CAN. Beginning with the calls launched on 15 March 2021, the cost of open access may be planned in any year of project performance.

They will be paid as a lump sum and settled as indirect costs.

There is no need to name the publisher in the proposal by whom the research results will be published. However, if you are planning open access publication, you should read the publisher’s policy to plan the appropriate publication strategy (e.g. check if the publisher accepts the copyright licences specified by the NCN and whether the publication of research results would comply with the Open Access Policy at the NCN).

The Open Access Policy at the NCN does not apply to monographs. The costs of monographs may be covered from the direct costs, including costs of open access publication. One should remember that either printing or open access should be funded. Double funding occurs when the same article is both printed and made available in open access.

NO, it is not mandatory. The Open Access Policy lays down the rules according to which research results are published in open access (applicable to articles in peer-reviewed journals but also, e.g. peer-reviewed conference papers or original research data). The policy does not apply to the publication of monographs, monograph chapters and peer-reviewed collected works. The cost of printing monographs may be planned as direct costs.

The costs of monograph publication may be funded from the costs of open access, although pursuant to the call documents, the costs of open access publication of monographs may also be planned as direct costs. Open access publication of monographs is not obligatory.

The costs of monograph publication will be considered as eligible costs once positively reviewed by the NCN (the monograph evaluation criteria are available here).