At European level, the Horizon 2020 project establishes the following requirements for funded projects:
All peer-reviewed articles published in periodicals and funded by the Horizon 2020 Project must be open access.
This open access can be reached via the green road, i.e. by depositing in repositories, or via the golden road, namely by publishing in open access journals. In this case, the costs deriving from APCs can be deducted from the budget for the funded project.
The maximum embargo period is 6 months for Science and Technology, and 12 months for Social Sciences and Humanities articles.
Reading and downloading the article must be included in the permitted uses. Moreover, authors are encouraged to retain their exploitation rights and apply Creative Commons licences to allow other uses, such as distribution or data mining.
The European Commission also encourages beneficiaries to extend the scope of open access to other types of documents, such as monographs or conference participations.
Article 43 of the Model Grant Agreement envisages a reduction in project funding in the event of non-compliance with this open access requirement.
