Open access in ERC and EU Horizon Europe: how to comply

The European Research Council and European Commission (EC) require open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications including monographs and other long-text formats resulting from calls under Horizon Europe project funding.

For the previous Framework Programme 8 ERC and H2020 steps to compliance see our guidance page.

Principal Investigators (“beneficiaries”) must deposit either the published version or their peer-reviewed author accepted manuscript into a trusted repository and ensure open access at the time of publication at the latest.  A Creative Commons Attribute licence (CC BY) must be applied in most cases; monographs and other long-text outputs are permitted the more restrictive CC BY-NC and CC BY-ND licences.

Beneficiaries are recommended to ensure their chosen journal/venue meets the relevant funder requirements before submission. You are advised to check the Annotated Grant Agreement; details include confirmation that “only publication fees in full open access venues for scientific publications are eligible for reimbursement” (p.382).

St Andrews beneficiaries publishing in hybrid journals that mix Gold and subscription articles can benefit from rights retention under the University open access policy to meet their funder requirement of zero embargo and a CC BY using their author accepted manuscript.  There is no charge for this service.

See also the ERC Open Access Guidelines.

Resources and guides to support open science practices are available from OpenAIRE.

Follow the steps below to comply.

Horizon Europe steps to open access

  1. Submit papers to a journal of choice, there is no restriction provided you can comply with the policy.  If a researcher chooses to publish in a fully open access journal, APC costs should be claimed within the project period and budget. Remember to include APC costs in grant applications. Only APCs in fully open access model journals can be included, and must be incurred while the grant is active; the Open Research Europe publishing venue is available during and beyond the lifetime of the award.
  2. Acknowledge project funding  for the publication in the format: This project has received funding from the [European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme] under grant agreement No [Number].
  3. Deposit the author accepted manuscript in Pure on acceptance to meet University requirements which will also meet Horizon Europe requirements.  Rights retention may apply.
  4. Add your publication to the final report of the project. You should provide bibliographic details and a permanent identifier to the open access version of your paper. You can find this link in the St Andrews Research Repository if you completed step 3 above.

Contact openaccess@st-andrews.ac.uk for help and support.