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Open Access

In Europe

  • The European Commission wants open science to become "the modus operandi for all researchers". (Fact sheet: Open science in Horizon Europe).
    Horizon Europe requires immediate open access to all publications. (Open Science in Horizon Europe)
  • cOAlition S and Plan S: on September 4th, 2018, Science Europe, an organization of European national funders (which includes the European Research Council), announces the launch of Plan S, built around this main principle: "By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms." In May 2019, the start date has been delayed to January 2021.

In Switzerland

Swiss higher education institutions support open access. According to the Swiss National Strategy on Open Access, adopted in 2017, all publicly funded research in Switzerland should be open-access in 2024.

The Swiss National Science Foundation requires grantees to make their work open access as of 2020. It also offers grants to cover APCs (Article-Processing Charges), to publish in full OA journals. But it does not cover the costs of publication in "hybrid journals" (subscription journals with an OA option).

As of January 1st, 2023, the SNF is joining plan S. It means that researchers funded by the SNF will have to publish their journal articles open access immediately, and there will be no possibility of an embargo period anymore. The CC BY licence is required for journal articles. The SNF applies the Rights Retention Strategy of plan S: "on submitting the manuscript, researchers reserve the right to make it freely available with immediate effect under a CC-BY licence, citing their commitment to the SNSF". For books and book chapters, the maximum embargo period is 12 months.