With just five months to go for this EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, this is a new progress report based on the figures collected as of Nov 30th. At this point, this funding initiative has already funded 700 Open Access post-grant publications arising from 534 completed FP7 projects.The dataset for the APC payments made thus far that was recently shared with OpenAPC provides revealing graphic snapshots for the project and allows its current results to be compared to those arising from initi...

Little over five months away from its conclusion, the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot has shared an up-to-date dataset for the APC payments it has made thus far with the OpenAPC initiative run at Universität Bielefeld. The OpenAPC project started in June 2014 as a tool funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to collect standardized inputs for APC payments from different stakeholders – mainly institutions at the time – arising from the Gold Open Access funding initiative implemented by...

As mentioned in previous posts, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot has now started implementing pre-payment agreements with a number of publishers: BioMed Central, Copernicus, Wiley and BMJ.This requires a new set of workflows to be tested. So far we have usually been receiving funding requests for accepted manuscripts in fully Open Access journals via the OpenAIRE system. This is of course still the standard and recommended procedure to apply for funding. But from the beginning of June, we ar...

15 months into the project, this FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot has already funded well over 500 Open Access publications arising from finished FP7 projects. The 7th progress report shows its evolution with data as of Aug 31st, 2016.As stated in the previous report, the start of the implementation of the pre-payment agreements with publishers has had a significant impact on the initiative. Some of the areas where the influence is felt are: Nearly 40% of the funding requests processed in the la...

After funding over 400 Open Access publications during its first year of operation, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is now moving onto the pre-payment agreement implementation stage. OpenAIRE has recently signed agreements and deposited a pre-paid fund with a number of publishers – BioMed Central, BMJ, Copernicus and Wiley – in order to be able to fund eligible manuscripts upon acceptance. This means a much simpler workflow for authors, since no invoice will be required anymore to receive t...

The FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot has recently completed its first year of operation since its launch on May 30th 2015. This sixth progress report looks into the results for the period. Most figures shown in the report are however dated June 15th, as this marks an important milestone for the project: as of mid-June, the pre-payment agreements that OpenAIRE has signed with publishers like Copernicus, BioMed Central and Wiley are starting to be implemented. This means a new set of additional wo...

This is the 5th bi-monthly progress report for the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot. Ten months into the project, the number of approved funding requests has already reached 300, which already makes this Gold Open Access funding initiative one of the largest of its kind. The average APC fee paid for the 283 approved requests for journals articles (which currently make up 95% of the total funded publications) is €1,432. This is nearly the same value that was collected for the previous report, ...

The publisher engagement plans for the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot involve signing pre-payment agreements with publishers as a means of improving the dissemination of this funding initiative towards eligible researchers and projects. Moreover, pre-payment agreements will very much simplify the invoicing workflows, making the funding of APC payments much quicker and easier for authors.Following these plans, OpenAIRE has signed a first contract for a pre-payment agreement with Ubiquity Press ...

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 s...

One of the main aims of this EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is to openly share information on the figures associated to the gradual increase in its uptake. We have so far done this via periodic reporting (see the most recent one here, with comprehensive figures as of Nov 30th, 2015). In the meantime, our technical team at the Athena Research Centre in Athens have been working on the statistics module that would allow relevant data for this funding initiative such as the total number of appr...

As a result of a growing interest from UK researchers and academic support staff on how to apply for the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot funding, a first 'national webinar' on this European Commission funding initiative was held on 19 January. The webinar was targeted to UK-based researchers, project coordinators, research administrators and librarians and sought to: Introduce the pilot, the eligibility requirements and the pilot results so far; Explain how the central funding service can be used; Addre...

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 ...

Following an invitation from Universidade do Minho, an update on the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot was delivered on July 28th 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...

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:...