Academy of Finland further specifies its principles on open access scientific publishing

The Academy of Finland has refined its guidelines on ensuring open access to scientific publications produced in Academy-funded research projects. Besides these changes, the Academy’s requirement on facilitating immediate access to and reuse of peer-reviewed articles will not change.

Ensuring open access through immediate self-archiving (“rights retention”)

As a rule, the Academy continues to require that the projects it funds ensure immediate open access to their peer-reviewed articles. However, for the time being, the Academy will not adopt the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy, which supports researchers in immediate self-archiving. If the open access is implemented through self-archiving and the publisher of the scientific journal does not agree to immediate self-archiving, projects may accept the use of embargoes (up to 12 months in social sciences and humanities, up to 6 months in other fields). The Academy will monitor the preparation of the Finnish Copyright Act as regards the promotion of self-archiving, and strives to enable immediate self-archiving in all its funding decisions.

Using CC licences for open access

The Academy will continue to require Plan S-compliant licences for peer-reviewed articles produced in Academy-funded research projects. As a rule, the Academy requires the use of Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0, but the use of three other CC licences is also allowed in exceptional cases and for justified reasons. However, contrary to past practice, projects need not separately request permission from the Academy for the use of permitted exceptional licences. The change will be applied retroactively to Academy funding decisions made after 2 November 2020.

Open access to conference proceedings and monographs

The Academy also urges researchers to publish their conference articles and monographs with open access. However, this further guidance on the implementation and funding of open access conference articles and monographs will only be finalised once the national policy on open access to scholarly publications has been supplemented in this respect.

Accounting for publishing costs in funding decisions and invoicing

Article processing charges (APCs), which are part of the costs of open access to peer-reviewed articles, will continue to be included in the overheads of projects funded by the Academy. In contrast to previous guidelines, scientific publishers will not need to join the cOAlition S Journal Comparison Service, which will launch in autumn 2022, in order for the publishing costs to be accepted in a research project funded by the Academy.

However, Academy of Finland recommends that international publishers participate in cOAlition S’ Journal Comparison Service in order to support the development of global scientific publishing community.

• See the Academy’s updated policies on open access publishing.