Open Access (OA) - publishing

• Results from publicly funded research should be openly available to all.
• Open Access is a matter of solidarity, as research is shared with those who can't afford to pay for access.
• Open access publications are read and cited more often than articles available only through subscription.
• An increasing number of funders demand open access to research publications funded by them:
  • The Ministry of Education and Research requires that institutions ensure that all publically funded research articles are published openly or entered into an institutional archive in agreement with the publisher, although without infringing on the academic freedom of choice in journals or publishers.
  • The Research Council of Norway requires open access to all journal articles resulting from research funded by it. The Research Council has signed Plan S, and the new mandates concern proposals from 2021 onward.

Read more: Phd on Track - Open Access

The government’s goal is that all publicly funded Norwegian research articles should be made openly available by 2024, and the government has established guidelines and measures for open access articles.

Gold Open Access: Publishing in genuine Open Access journals, where all articles are openly accessible, without subscription, on the journal's website. Some OA journals require that you pay a publication fee after your article has been accepted. You may apply HVL for coverage of your publication costs. 

Green Open Access: Publishing in traditional subscription journals while self-archiving the accepted version of your article in your institution's repository, in this case HVL Open. "Accepted version" means the final version that you submit to the journal, after the peer-review process and subsequent revisions. This content of this version is identical with the published one, but it has not been copy-edited by the publisher. Here is an example of a published version versus a self-archived version. Upload your article in a manuscript version when registering it in Cristin. Remember to obtain consent from your co-authors, if any. The library will make sure that you have uploaded the correct version and that it is publishable in HVL Open. 

Hybrid Open Access: Publishing in a traditional subscription journal while making your article openly accessible by paying a publication fee. This fee is normally higher than the publication fee charged by Open Access journals (Gold). Note that neither HVL nor the Research Council of Norway cover the costs for hybrid publication, since Norwegian institutions in most cases already subscribe to the journal. If in doubt whether a journal is Open Access or hybrid, contact the library. 

"Publish and read": As of 2020 new agreements between Norwegian academic institutions, HVL included, and the publishers Wiley, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer, Sage and Cambridge University Press make articles credited to these institutions by its corresponding author openly accessible. Note that not all of these publishers' journals are included in the agreement, and that there is a quota as to how many articles pr. year each institution may publish openly. For details, see the website Openscience.no.    

Under the advanced search options in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, you can search for journals within your scientific field that are either DOAJ-registered (Gold OA) or have a publisher agreement.

Open Access articles can be found in most academic databases along with other publications. Some databases, such as Oria, Scopus and Web of Science, have search delimiters that can be used for specifying Open Access.

The institutional archive HVL Open gives open access to publications by students and employees at HVL. The archive is part of Brage, a consortium of institutions with similar archives. Open Access doctoral dissertations from many European institutions are also indexed in DART-Europe.

Several tools can help finding author manuscripts (green Open Access) of articles published in subscription journals. Unpaywall and Open Access Button provide browser extensions that automatically link to known manuscript versions. Google Scholar will also link to green versions.

HVL's Open Access Policy aims to ensure that research results produced by our staff are made openly accessible as far as possible. The main principles of our policy are the following: 

• HVL researchers have full academic freedom to publish where they wish.
• They are at the same time encouraged to examine the possibility of publishing in Open Access journals.
• In cases where two or more journals can be considered equal in terms of academic standing, and at least one of them is an Open Access journal, the researcher should choose the Open Access journal.
• All peer-reviewed academic articles published by HVL researchers should be deposited in HVL Open, regardless of whether they are published in Open Access journals or not (see Ways to Open Access above). When the article is published without Open Access, the Accepted Manuscript version of the article should be deposited. HVL's rights policy allows HLV to make the manuscript available immediately under a Creative Commons CC BY licence. Authors can make reservations against this if needed.
• For further details, see HVL's Open Access Policy. 

Publish and read

Since 2019, HVL and other Norwegian institutions have agreements with the publishers Wiley, Elsevier, Springer, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and ACM, covering both journal subscriptions and open access publishing for journal articles by affiliated researchers.

In order for the agreement to apply, the corresponding author must credit a Norwegian institution that takes part in the agreement as his or her affiliation. Please note that some journals are excluded from the agreements.

Discounts

HVL has agreements for discounts with Frontiers and MDPI that also allow the publishers to send invoices to HVL directly. The Open Access fund will pay, under its normal conditions.

The agreements with Taylor & Francis, Springer and Elsevier also include a discount for pure Open Access journals, with central invoicing.

Under all the agreements, the publisher will check with HVL whether an article qualifies for funding, so the author does not need to apply to the OA fund separately.

Projects that are granted funding by the Research Council of Norway after 1 January 2021, must adhere to Plan S. All journal articles published from such projects must be given immediate Open Access – either “Gold” or “Green”, or through publish and read agreements (cf. “Ways to Open Access”, above). The Journal Checker Tool can be used for checking whether and how a publication can be Plan S compliant.

Books and book chapters are exempt from the demand of Open Access, for the time being. Grants from before 2021 are not affected by Plan S. For these, older policies remain in effect.

Articles that are to be published green Open Access need to be registered and uploaded to Cristin at the time of publication. Don’t forget to register the project code! To ensure immediate publication, the following must be included in the manuscript sent to the publisher:

This research was funded, in whole or in part, by The Research Council of Norway [6 digit project number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.

One of the following licenses is required: Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), alternatively Public Domain Dedication (CC0) or Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). Attribution NoDerivatives (CC BY-ND) may be used when there are scientific or professional justifications, and these must be stated in the project’s end report.

Projects funded through Horizon Europe have Open Access requirements for both publications and data. Both Green and Gold OA are allowed (see “Ways to Open Access”, above), under common conditions:

• At the latest at the time of publication, a machine-readable electronic copy of the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication, is deposited in a trusted repository for scientific publications
• Immediate open access is provided via the repository, under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or a licence with equivalent rights; for monographs and other long-text formats, the licence may exclude commercial uses and derivative works (e.g. CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND).

Horizon can provide funding only for publishing through pure Open Access venues.

Data generated through the project are also required to be open and in line with the FAIR principles. Among other things, this means:

• To create, adhere to and update a Data Management Plan (DMP)
• To deposit research data in a trusted repository. When required by the call conditions, the repository must be federated in the EOSC
• Data should be as open as possible, unless it's against legitimate interests (data protection rules, privacy, confidentiality, trade secrets...), and these must be explained in the DMP.

Relevant previous publications (including published datasets) should be listed in the proposal. Journal articles are expected to be Open Access, whereas data should be FAIR and “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.