FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot Q&A with NOADs in the OpenAIRE South Region

Following an invitation from Universidade do Minho, an update on the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot was delivered on July 28^th at the monthly coordination meeting for the OpenAIRE NOADS in the South Region, including Portugal, Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, Cyprus and Turkey. This included a short presentation and a 30 mins Q&A session where different aspects of the initiative were discussed with the NOAD representatives.


Lists of eligible FP7 projects were shared prior to the event with the NOADs for Cyprus, Malta and Turkey, so that the Pilot advocacy may also start in these countries once the eligible researchers and projects to contact are identified by NOADs and institutions. Besides this, representatives from the University of Cyprus, University of Malta and Izmir Institute of Technology registered in the central system with Library Staff roles, adding two new entries to the list of represented countries, which already covers 20 of them.

The difficulty of reaching eligible researchers was a high-profile topic in the discussion, given that the eligible FP7 project spreadsheets shared by the Pilot coordination (which are taken from the CORDIS database) do not contain such scientific contact person information. This issue has previously been highlighted by other NOADs, specifically the Austrian one, and it can be tackled in different ways.

Besides working with institutions – which are likely to have some internal project management or research information management system that contains such data – NCPs were suggested by Universidade do Minho as a potentially useful alternative stakeholder to collect such information from.

Questions were also raised on the eligibility for funding of FP7 projects finished between Jan 1st and Apr 30th, 2013, which when checked in the central system show a “Moderator intervention required” status.


National webinars will be carried out in September in specific countries like Portugal where the NOAD (UMinho) will provide information on the FP7 Post-Grant Pilot to any interested Portuguese institution. This is a best practice that could be followed in other countries, and the Pilot coordination remains available for taking part in such webinars and answering questions on the initiative.

There was strong interest among the meeting attendees on the APC-equivalent funding mechanism the Pilot is examining at the moment as a means to support non-APC-funded OA journal platforms. Conversations are being held at the time with specific stakeholders like the Open Library of Humanities in the UK and Revistas CSIC in Spain, but the discussions are open to any other platform wishing to know more about how this alternative funding mechanism is starting to take shape.

A suggestion was finally made for the NOADs to put together brief summaries of the funding landscape in their countries, specifically addressing Gold Open Access funds available at institutions or delivered by given funders. This would allow researchers to know more about the opportunities they may have to collect funding for their OA publishing fees, and will also show the wide differences across countries. When adequately disseminated, the Pilot could actually be expected to deliver better in countries where little Gold OA funding is available than in those where there's a range of available mechanisms for funding these expenses, even if it may take a bit longer to get the workflows in place.