The third progress report for the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is already available with figures as of Nov 30th. Six months into the project, the number of approved funding requests is sharply rising following an early October direct communication from the European Commission to every FP7 project coordinator with information on the initiative. The number of funded applications has again more than doubled since the last report and currently amounts to 119.Besides including an updated distr...

The policy guidelines for this new post-grant funding initiative state that "The FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot provides an additional instrument to improve access to research results from FP7 projects, but does not affect authors' choice on how their project publications are made Open Access". Some questions have arrived via the Pilot helpdesk asking whether this actually means that hybrid journals are supported by this funding initiative, which is of course not the case, as specifically ment...

       The second progress report is already available for the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot providing information on the first four months of the project with data as of Sep 30th. The results show that the initiative is gradually taking up, with more than double funding requests having been granted in this 4-month period than in the first two months of the Pilot. The rhythm of growth is however slower than initially expected, due to both the season which the initiative has been launched i...

At the moment, when an author gets an approval for a funding request from the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot s/he is asked to tell the publisher to please issue the invoice for the APC payment to Athena Research Centre and then to upload such invoice in the central system in order for the payment to the publisher to be processed by the project. This is a time-consuming, suboptimal procedure that could be significantly simplified if the Pilot had pre-finance schemes in place with publishers in ...

The identification of Gold Open Access with the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) is a widespread misunderstanding that has often led this alternative route for OA implementation to be dismissed as commercial publisher-friendly and prone to double dipping. However, Gold OA means publishing in any Open Access journal, and it's a well-known fact that over two thirds of the OA journals hosted in the DOAJ charge no APCs to their authors.This is the reason why when discussing the way the f...

This post shows the main results of the first report on the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot initiative. The report examines the project progress during its first two months of operation, based on the data for approved funding requests for Open Access publishing fees for research articles and monographs collected until July 31st, 2015. The parallel project workline for implementing an APC-equivalent funding mechanism for non-APC-based Open Access journals and platforms will be summarized in an independen...

A well-attended 3-hr FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot workshop was held on June 24th at the University of London Senate House within the LIBER Annual Conference 2015. Over 60 attendees made it to the event, which was no small feat with five additional workshops being simultaneously held in a parallel session. A quick hand-raising survey at the start of the session showed attendees were mainly representing universities and research centres, with approximately one third of them being UK-based, ano...

Following the FP7 Post-Grant OA publishing funds Pilot webinar for National Open Access Desks (NOADs) held last May 19th, some NOADs expressed their interest in supporting the initiative by having it disseminated to institutions and researchers in their countries. The Pilot welcomed this offer and committed to sharing best practices in dissemination arising from the work of the most proactive NOADs, which could provide a useful example for others to follow. This post provides a summary of the di...

A common misunderstanding has frequently come up in the questions collected during the first few weeks of activity of this Gold OA Pilot regarding the role the institutions involved in the "pilot within the Pilot" are playing. Many institutions seem to think that the Pilot activity is restricted to the institutions included in this list of "participating institutions"  and requests have in fact been collected from institutions expressing their wish to join this list.This is not the case however:...

A Workshop on the OpenAIRE2020 FP7 post-grant Gold Open Access Pilot will be held on June 24th at the LIBER Annual Conference in London. This workshop will provide a key opportunity for the dissemination of this initiative, whose success will heavily rely on an effective outreach strategy towards eligible researchers and FP7 projects. The main aim of this event is to provide more information on the progress of the initiative to the institutions attending the LIBER Annual Conference and to share ...

A first webinar on the EC Gold Open Access Pilot was delivered to OpenAIRE National Open Access Desks (NOADs) on May 19th following the release of the Pilot policy guidelines on May 7th. The main aim of this dissemination activity was to provide an update on the current state of the Pilot to the OpenAIRE node institutions across the EU that will collaborate with LIBER in further disseminating the initiative in their respective countries.The webinar, which was hosted by EIFL, had 32 attendees fro...