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Publications funded in whole or in part by Horizon Europe grants must meet the Horizon Europe open access requirements. Find out how to comply, and what funding is available.
Guidance for outputs funded by Horizon 2020/ERC (2014-2020)
The Horizon Europe open access policy applies to peer-reviewed scientific publications supported in whole or in part by these grants. This includes ERC calls for funding under the Horizon Europe ERC Work Programme (see the ERC open access guidelines).
These outputs must be made open access in a repository on or before publication under the CC BY licence. Monographs and long-form outputs may use the CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND licence. The policy is set out in the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement, and is similar to the new Wellcome and UKRI policies. It also contains open data requirements. There is further information in the Open science in Horizon Europe factsheet.
Open access funding
Gold open access charges for papers in fully open access journals can be paid from Horizon Europe grants, provided they are incurred during the duration of the project. Open Research Europe is available after the end of the grant. Gold open access charges for papers in subscription/hybrid journals are not eligible for funding.
UCL can only pay open access charges for peer-reviewed research and review articles funded by a Horizon Europe grant where the paper:
- has a UCL corresponding author and the journal is included in UCL's transformative agreements or
- is eligible for funding from UCL's Wellcome Trust, UK Research Council (UKRI), CRUK and/or BHF funds.
Complying with your funder's policy
Funded authors should establish if their chosen journal is compliant before submission and before applying for funding. Compliant types of journal are summarised in the table below, along with advice on identifying them.
| Open access option | How to check your journal |
|---|---|
| Fully OA journals or platforms (Gold open access), including Open Research Europe. | Check DOAJ to see if the journal is fully open access. |
| Subscription/hybrid journals in transformative agreements (Gold open access). | Check if the journal is included in UCL's transformative agreements by searching for your journal in our transformative agreements journal list. Then check the publisher section on the UCL's transformative agreements page to see whether your paper is eligible. |
| Subscription/hybrid journals that allow the final version or Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to be made open access under CC BY in a compliant repository on publication (Green open access). | Check the journal’s open access policy, often available on the journal’s webpages, or check Sherpa Romeo. If in doubt, check with the Open Access Team. Many journals do not currently allow this. If your journal is not in the categories above, you may need to follow our advice below for non-compliant journals. |
| High-energy physics papers in SCOAP3 journals are automatically published with Gold open access, and meet UKRI requirements even if the journals are not in a transformative agreement with UCL. This means that HEP papers published in the subscription journals Chinese Physics C, Physical Review C, Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters comply. | Participating journals are listed on the SCOAP3 webpages. Papers are eligible if posted on arXiv with the primary category hep-ex, hep-th, hep-ph, or hep-lat. |
For the Gold open access options listed above, the publisher must make the final version immediately open access under CC BY on their webpages upon publication. You also need to upload the paper to UCL's Research Publications Service (RPS), or deposit in a repository such as Europe PubMed Central, arXiv or Zenodo, in order to meet the Horizon Europe requirements.
Non-compliant journals
If your journal is not compliant (i.e. one that does not comply through the options in the table above), you may want to consider submitting elsewhere. Alternatively, you should use the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy, which the EC has adopted for Horizon Europe grants. This means that you will need to retain the right to make your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) open access on publication under the CC BY licence. Horizon Europe authors may wish to follow the guidance for non-compliant journals on UCL's UKRI/Wellcome open access webpages, and to adapt the Wellcome submission statement for use in their papers.