FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot report 6 months into the initiative

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 distribution of funded requests by country, the report contains an analysis of the rejected requests so far, with their number and the reasons for their rejection (also featuring information by country). Funding applications for articles in hybrid journals and for previously published works continue to be the most frequent causes for request rejection. A list of funded journal titles was recently released as a supporting instrument for helping authors and institutions tell fully Open Access journals from hybrid ones.

Although the list of countries where funding requests have arrived from has significantly grown during these two months, ten EU Member States are still not featured on the list. These are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania and Slovakia, and efforts are under way to make sure they are part of it in the next one.

Work is also under way to implement an automatic reporting feature directly from the system for processing funding requests. A beta version for this reporting feature has now been developed by the Athena Research Centre and is being fine-tuned before releasing it. The map below showing the distribution of funding requests by country is in fact a first innovation that the system will make available.


The report also shows the updated APC distribution and the current average APC fee paid by the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, which is €1419. This means a slight increase with regard to previous average values and like other aspects in the report, it's the result of the above-mentioned direct dissemination initiative by the EC. While having meant a very positive boost for the number of arriving funding requests, it has also resulted in a higher number of requests for publications in hybrid journals and for APC fees above the €2,000 funding cap.

The report finally includes the rapidly growing funding request distribution by institutions, although only for the four first countries in the list in order not to make the table exceedingly long. If any NOAD from other country would wish to know the distribution for their institutions, please feel free to ask for it via email.