4th FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot progress report

Eight months into the initiative, this is the 4th progress report for the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, with figures as of Jan 31st, 2016. The report is a complement to the live reporting module whose release was announced a week ago and provides a snapshot of the progress of this funding initiative with up-to-date figures on average APCs and funding request distribution by document types, countries, publishers and journals.



The progress report series and the live reporting module in the system
The live reporting module has now been released at the OpenAIRE system for collecting and processing funding requests. This has some implications on this progress report series, since this module provides live figures on the Pilot implementation. However, the periodic progress reports still make sense for a number of reasons:

• There is value in a periodic snapshot into the progress of the initiative and into the evolution of its figures;
• The figures provided by these reports are ahead of the live reporting system in that they take into account the APC fees for approved funding requests, while the stats module will calculate its average APC fees on the basis of the payments that have already been made. This means the progress reports show the trend for the average APC fee;
• This report series can address specific reporting areas that haven't been brought into the system. In this 4th report an insight is for instance provided on the funding request that have been approved so far with APC fee values above the € 2,000 funding cap for this initiative (more about this below). Future progress reports will provide similar fine-grained analysis that the live reporting module does not aim to deliver.

Findings from this 4th progress report

• The number of approved funding requests keeps growing and is already above 200. The general rule whereby the number of approved funding requests is doubled for every new progress report (i.e. every 2 months) still loosely holds.
• The first book chapters have already been funded, adding a new document type to the list of funded outputs. We're still missing conference proceedings, data papers and software papers.
• The current average APC is € 1439, which means a slight increase with regard to previous reports. This is the result of the growing number of approved requests with APCs above the funding cap, which are awarded the maximum € 2,000 funding thus pushing up the average value. An analysis on these requests is provided at the end of the report.

• The list of countries with approved funding requests keeps growing: since the last report was released early Dec, inaugural funding requests have been approved for Croatia, Slovenia and Mexico.
• Seven EU member states are still on the no-funding-request-yet list: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Luxembourg and Romania.
• PLoS and NPG are by far the most frequently selected publishers by the researchers funded by this EC FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot, while in terms of journals PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports and Nature Communications are the most popular ones. The full list of funded (fully OA) journal titles so far is being kept up-to-date in the meantime.
• FP7 projects in the areas 'Marie-Curie Actions', 'ERC' and 'Health' are collecting most of the funding at the moment.

Analysis of the above-the-funding-cap requests
This report looks at the increasing number of approved funding requests with APC fees above the € 2,000 funding cap for the initiative as a driver for the growth in the average APC fee. 34 funding requests of this kind have been approved so far (which means a moderate 16% of the total number). The report analyses their distribution by month, publisher, journal title and country and comes up with interesting findings. Besides driving up the average APC fee, these specific funding requests cause an underestimation of the average APC fee shown in the system (€1,391 at the moment) as they usually take longer to process and will often not be included in the system calculations based on paid invoices.

The next report, due early Apr 2016, will look into the average times between funding request submission and payment. If you have any suggestion for other areas of the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot implementations that you'd like to see addressed in this progress report series, please send us an email and we'll look into it.