The European Commission and Open Access
With Horizon Europe, the European Commission has decided to place greater emphasis on Open Access policies. Project beneficiaries must ensure open access to peer-reviewed scientific publications related to their results. Specifically (Model Grant Agreement Horizon Europe Annex 5 art. 17):
1) Immediate publication in Open Access on a Full/Gold OA journal with a CC BY license is required.
2) Publication on hybrid journals with a CC BY license is allowed only as a second option.
A new feature compared to Horizon 2020 is the ability to claim costs for any APC (Article Processing Charge) incurred by the beneficiary only if the journal is fully open access. This excludes hybrid journals from being claimed on project funds, as these journals use a model where some articles are available openly for a fee (APC), while others remain behind a paywall (subscription-based). This approach was adopted to avoid "double dipping", where a publisher charges an author for open access while also selling the final product to libraries (through subscriptions), resulting in paying for a product that should be free.
Open Access at INRiM: Institutional Policy
As outlined in the “Policy di Istituto sull’Accesso Aperto (Open Access) alle pubblicazioni scientifiche”, he scientific community at INRiM is encouraged to publish their articles, also for Research Quality Assessment (Anvur), which INRiM adheres to (Art. 17), in journals that undergo peer review and thus have international scientific approval.
Articles should be published in one of the following ways to ensure open access:
- Gold Open Access: Publishing in a fully open access journal that, upon payment of APC (Article Processing Charge), makes the article immediately available on the journal’s site and allows the editorial version to be deposited in an Institutional Repository in open access mode. Hybrid journals, which are accessible for some articles for a fee but allow open access publication for some articles (hybrid OA), are also included in this category. INRiM has established Transformative Agreements with many publishers to cover publication costs in hybrid journals.
- Platinum o Diamond Open Access: Publishing in a fully open access journal that makes the article immediately available on the journal’s site for free and allows the editorial version to be deposited in an Institutional Repository in open access mode.
- Green Open Access: Publishing in a subscription-based journal that allows deposit in an Institutional Repository and disciplinary archives (e.g., PubMed, ArXiv) in a version permitted by the publisher and subject to any embargo period. The Green option should be carefully evaluated if the published article is associated with a Horizon Europe project. More information is available in the section "The European Commission and Open Access."